“What has?” said Rincewind.
The rule of sourcery.
Rincewind looked blank. “Is that good?”
Do you ever understand anything anyone says to you?
Rincewind felt on firmer ground here. “No,” he said. “Not always. Not lately. Not often.”
“Are you sure you are a wizard?” said Conina.
“It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of,” he said, with conviction.
“How strange.”
Rincewind sat on the Luggage in the sun on the foredeck of the Ocean Waltzer as it lurched peacefully across the green waters of the Circle Sea. Around them men did what he was sure were important nautical things, and he hoped they were doing them correctly, because next to heights he hated depths most of all.
“You look worried,” said Conina, who was cutting his hair. Rincewind tried to make his head as small as possible as the blades flashed by.
“That’s because I am.”
“What exactly is the Apocralypse?”
Rincewind hesitated. “Well,” he said, “it’s the end of the world. Sort of.”
“Sort of? Sort of the end of the world? You mean we won’t be certain? We’ll look around and say ‘Pardon me, did you hear something?’?”
“It’s just that no two seers have ever agreed about it. There have been all kinds of vague predictions. Quite mad, some of them. So it was called the Apocralypse.” He looked embarrassed. “It’s a sort of apocryphal Apocalypse. A kind of pun, you see.”
“Not very good.”
“No. I suppose not.”*
Conina’s scissors snipped busily.
“I must say the captain seemed quite happy to have us aboard,” she observed.
“That’s because they think it’s lucky to have a wizard on the boat,” said Rincewind. “It isn’t, of course.”
“Lots of people believe it,” she said.
“Oh, it’s lucky for other people, just not for me. I can’t swim.”
“What, not a stroke?”
Rincewind hesitated, and twiddled the star on his hat cautiously.
“About how deep is the sea here, would you say? Approximately?” he said.
“About a dozen fathoms, I believe.”
“Then I could probably swim about a dozen fathoms, whatever they are.”
“Stop trembling like that, I nearly had your ear off,” Conina snapped. She glared at a passing seaman and waved her scissors. “What’s the matter, you never saw a man have a haircut before?”
Someone up in the rigging made a remark which caused a ripple of ribald laughter in the topgallants, unless they were forecastles.
“I shall pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Conina, and gave the comb a savage yank, dislodging numerous inoffensive small creatures.
“Ow!”
“Well, you should keep still!”
“It’s a little difficult to keep still knowing who it is that’s waving a couple of steel blades around my head!”
And so the morning passed, with scudding wavelets, the creaking of the rigging, and a rather complex layer cut. Rincewind had to admit, looking at himself in a shard of mirror, that there was a definite improvement.
The captain had said that they were bound for the city of Al Khali, on the hubward coast of Klatch.
“Like Ankh, only with sand instead of mud,” said Rincewind, leaning over the rail. “But quite a good slave market.”
“Slavery is immoral,” said Conina firmly.
“Is it? Gosh,” said Rincewind.
“Would you like me to trim your beard?” said Conina, hopefully.
She stopped, scissors drawn, and stared out to sea.
“Is there a kind of sailor that uses a canoe with sort of extra bits on the side and a sort of red eye painted on the front and a small sail?” she said.
“I’ve heard of Klatchian slave pirates,” said Rincewind, “but this is a big boat. I shouldn’t think one of them would dare attack it.”
“One of them wouldn’t,” said Conina, still staring at the fuzzy area where the sea became the sky, “but these five might.”
Rincewind peered at the distant haze, and then looked up at the man on watch, who shook his head.
“Come on,” he chuckled, with all the humor of a blocked drain. “You can’t really see anything out there. Can you?”
“Ten men in each canoe,” said Conina grimly.
“Look, a joke’s a joke—”
“With long curvy swords.”
“Well, I can’t see a—”
“—their long and rather dirty hair blowing in the wind—”
“With split ends, I expect?” said Rincewind sourly.
“Are you trying to be funny?”
“Me?”
“And here’s me without a weapon,” said Conina, sweeping back across the deck. “I bet there isn’t a decent sword anywhere on this boat.”
“Never mind. Perhaps they’ve just come for a quick shampoo.”
While Conina rummaged frantically in her pack Rincewind sidled over to the Archchancellor’s hatbox and cautiously raised the lid.
“There’s nothing out there, is there?” he asked.
How should I know? Put me on.
“What? On my head?”
Good grief.
“But I’m not an Archchancellor!” said Rincewind. “I mean, I’ve heard of cool-headed, but—”
I need to use your eyes. Now put me on. On your head.
“Um.”
Trust me.
Rincewind couldn’t disobey. He gingerly removed his battered gray hat, looked longingly at its disheveled star, and lifted the Archchancellor’s hat out of its box. It felt rather heavier than he’d expected. The octarines around the crown were glowing faintly.
He lowered it carefully onto his new hairstyle, clutching the brim tightly in case he felt the first icy chill.
In fact he simply felt incredibly light. And there was a feeling of great knowledge and power—not actually present, but just, mentally speaking, on the tip of his metaphorical tongue.
Odd scraps of memory flickered across his mind, and they weren’t any memories he remembered remembering before. He probed gently, as one touches a hollow tooth with the tongue, and there they were—
Two hundred dead Archchancellors, dwindling into the leaden, freezing past, one behind the other, watched him with blank gray eyes.
That’s why it’s so cold, he told himself, the warmth seeps into the dead world. Oh, no…
When the hat spoke, he saw two hundred pairs of pale lips move.
Who are you?
Rincewind, thought Rincewind. And in the inner recesses of his head he tried to think privately to himself…help.
He felt his knees begin to buckle under the weight of centuries.
What’s it like, being dead? he thought.
Death is but a sleep, said the dead mages.
But what does it feel like? Rincewind thought.
You will have an unrivalled chance to find out when those war canoes get here, Rincewind.
With a yelp of terror he thrust upwards and forced the hat off his head. Real life and sound flooded back in, but since someone was frantically banging a gong very close to his ear this was not much of an improvement. The canoes were visible to everyone now, cutting through the water with an eerie silence. Those black-clad figures manning the paddles should have been whooping and screaming; it wouldn’t have made it any better, but it would have seemed more appropriate. The silence bespoke an unpleasant air of purpose.
“Gods, that was awful,” he said. “Mind you, so is this.”
Crew members scurried across the deck, cutlasses in hand. Conina tapped Rincewind on the shoulder.
“They’ll try to take us alive,” she said.
“Oh,” said Rincewind weakly. “Good.”
Then he remembered something else about Klatchian slavers, and his throat went dry.
“You’ll—you’ll be the one they’ll be after,” he said. “I’ve heard about what they do—”
“Should I know?” said Conina. To Rincewind’s horror she didn’t appear to have found a weapon.
“They’ll throw you in a seraglio!”
She shrugged. “Could be worse.”
“But it’s got all these spikes and when they shut the door—” hazarded Rincewind. The canoes were close enough now to see the determined expressions of the rowers.
“That’s not a seraglio. That’s an Iron Maiden. Don’t you know what a seraglio is?”
“Um…”
She told him. He went crimson.
“Anyway, they’ll have to capture me first,” said Conina primly. “It’s you who should be worrying.”
“Why me?”
“You’re the only other one who’s wearing a dress.”
Rincewind bridled. “It’s a robe—”
“Robe, dress. You better hope they know the difference.”
A hand like a bunch of bananas with rings on grabbed Rincewind’s shoulder and spun him around. The captain, a Hublander built on generous bear-like lines, beamed at him through a mass of facial hair.
“Hah!” he said. “They know not that we aboard a wizard have! To create in their bellies the burning green fire! Hah?”
The dark forests of his eyebrows wrinkled as it became apparent that Rincewind wasn’t immediately ready to hurl vengeful magic at the invaders.
“Hah?” he insisted, making a mere single syllable do the work of a whole string of blood-congealing threats.
“Yes, well, I’m just—I’m just girding my loins,” said Rincewind. “That’s what I’m doing. Girding them. Green fire, you want?”
“Also to make hot lead run in their bones,” said the captain. “Also their skins to blister and living scorpions without mercy to eat their brains from inside, and—”
The leading canoe came alongside and a couple of grapnels thudded into the rail. As the first of the slavers appeared the captain hurried away, drawing his sword. He stopped for a moment and turned to Rincewind.
“You gird quickly,” he said. “Or no loins. Hah?”
Rincewind turned to Conina, who was leaning on the rail examining her fingernails.
“You’d better get on with it,” she said. “That’s fifty green fires and hot leads to go, with a side order for blisters and scorpions. Hold the mercy.”
“This sort of thing is always happening to me,” he moaned.
He peered over the rail to what he thought of as the main floor of the boat. The invaders were winning by sheer weight of numbers, using nets and ropes to tangle the struggling crew. They worked in absolute silence, clubbing and dodging, avoiding the use of swords wherever possible.
“Musn’t damage the merchandise,” said Conina. Rincewind watched in horror as the captain went down under a press of dark shapes, screaming, “Green fire! Green fire!”
Rincewind backed away. He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred percent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try.
“What are you waiting for? Let’s go while they’re occupied,” he said to Conina.
“I need a sword,” she said.
“You’ll be spoiled for choice in a minute.”
“One will be enough.”
Rincewind kicked the Luggage.
“Come on,” he snarled. “You’ve got a lot of floating to do.”
The Luggage extended its little legs with exaggerated nonchalance, turned slowly, and settled down beside the girl.
“Traitor,” said Rincewind to its hinges.
The battle already seemed to be over. Five of the raiders stalked up the ladder to the afterdeck, leaving most of their colleagues to round up the defeated crew below. The leader pulled down his mask and leered briefly and swarthily at Conina; and then he turned and leered for a slightly longer period at Rincewind.
“This is a robe,” said Rincewind quickly. “And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.” He took a deep breath. “Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.”
“A wizard? Wizards don’t make good strong slaves,” mused the leader.
“Absolutely right,” said Rincewind. “So if you’ll just see your way clear to letting me go—”
The leader turned back to Conina and signaled to one of his companions. He jerked a tattooed thumb toward Rincewind.
“Do not kill him too quickly. In fact—” He paused, and treated Rincewind to a smile full of teeth. “Maybe…yes. And why not? Can you sing, wizard?”
“I might be able to,” said Rincewind, cautiously. “Why?”
“You could be just the man the Seriph needs for a job in the harem.” A couple of slavers sniggered.
“It could be a unique opportunity,” the leader went on, encouraged by this audience appreciation. There was more broadminded approval from behind him.
Rincewind backed away. “I don’t think so,” he said, “thanks all the same. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.”
“Oh, but you could be,” said the leader, his eyes bright. “You could be.”
“Oh, for goodness sake,” muttered Conina. She glanced at the men on either side of her, and then her hands moved. The one stabbed with the scissors was possibly better off than the one she raked with the comb, given the kind of mess a steel comb can make of a face. Then she reached down, snatched up a sword dropped by one of the stricken men, and lunged at the other two.
The leader turned at the screams, and saw the Luggage behind him with its lid open. And then Rincewind cannoned into the back of him, pitching him forward into whatever oblivion lay in the multidimensional depths of the chest.
There was the start of a bellow, abruptly cut off.
Then there was a click like the shooting of the bolt on the gates of Hell.
Rincewind backed away, trembling. “A unique opportunity,” he muttered under his breath, having just got the reference.
At least he had a unique opportunity to watch Conina fight. Not many men ever got to see it twice.
Her opponents started off grinning at the temerity of a slight young girl in attacking them, and then rapidly passed through various stages of puzzlement, doubt, concern and abject gibbeting terror as they apparently became the center of a flashing, tightening circle of steel.
She disposed of the last of the leader’s bodyguard with a couple of thrusts that made Rincewind’s eyes water and, with a sigh, vaulted the rail on the main deck. To Rincewind’s annoyance the Luggage barrelled after her, cushioning its fall by dropping heavily onto a slaver, and adding to the sudden panic of the invaders because, while it was bad enough to be attacked with deadly and ferocious accuracy by a rather pretty girl in a white dress with flowers on it, it was even worse for the male ego to be tripped up and bitten by a travel accessory; it was pretty bad for all the rest of the male, too.
Rincewind peered over the railing.
“Showoff,” he muttered.
A throwing knife clipped the wood near his chin and ricocheted past his ear. He raised his hand to the sudden stinging pain, and stared at it in horror before gently passing out. It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting.
The market in Sator Square, the wide expanse of cobbles outside the black gates of the University, was in full cry.
It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired. And most of the merchandise was available in Sator market, which over the years had grown, stall by stall, until the newcomers were up against the ancient stones of the University itself; in fact they made a handy display area for bolts of cloth and racks of charms.
No one noticed the gates swing back. But a silence rolled out of the University, spreading out across the noisy, crowded square like the first fresh wavelets of the tide trickling over a brackish swamp. In fact it wasn’t true silence at all, but a great roar of anti-noise. Silence isn’t the opposite of sound, it is merely its absence. But this was the sound that lies on the far side of silence, anti-noise, its shadowy decibels throttling the market cries like a fall of velvet.
The crowds stared around wildly, mouthing like goldfish and with about as much effect. All heads turned toward the gates.
Something else was flowing out besides that cacophony of hush. The stalls nearest the empty gateway began to grind across the cobbles, shedding merchandise. Their owners dived out of the way as the stalls hit the row behind them and scraped relentlessly onward, piling up until a wide avenue of clean, empty stones stretched the whole width of the square.
Ardrothy Longstaff, Purveyor of Pies Full of Personality, peered over the top of the wreckage of his stall in time to see the wizards emerge.
He knew wizards, or up until now he’d always thought he did. They were vague old boys, harmless enough in their way, dressed like ancient sofas, always ready customers for any of his merchandise that happened to be marked down on account of age and rather more personality than a prudent housewife would be prepared to put up with.
But these wizards were something new to Ardrothy. They walked out into Sator Square as if they owned it. Little blue sparks flashed around their feet. They seemed a little taller, somehow.
Or perhaps it was just the way they carried themselves.
Yes, that was it…
Ardrothy had a touch of magic in his genetic makeup, and as he watched the wizards sweep across the square it told him that the very best thing he could do for his health would be to pack his knives, and mincers in his little pack and have it away out of the city at any time in the next ten minutes.
The last wizard in the group lagged behind his colleagues and looked around the square with disdain.
“There used to be fountains out here,” he said. “You people—be off.”
The traders stared at one another. Wizards normally spoke imperiously, that was to be expected. But there was an edge to the voice that no one had heard before. It had knuckles in it.
Ardrothy’s eyes swivelled sideways. Arising out of the ruins of his jellied starfish and clam stall like an avenging angel, dislodging various molluscs from his beard and spitting vinegar, was Miskin Koble, who was said to be able to open oysters with one hand. Years of pulling limpets off rocks and wrestling the giant cockles in Ankh Bay had given him the kind of physical development normally associated with tectonic plates. He didn’t so much stand up as unfold.
Then he thudded his way toward the wizard and pointed a trembling finger at the ruins of his stall, from which half a dozen enterprising lobsters were making a determined bid for freedom. Muscles moved around the edges of his mouth like angry eels.
“Did you do that?” he demanded.
“Stand aside, oaf,” said the wizard, three words which in the opinion of Ardrothy gave him the ongoing life expectancy of a glass cymbal.
“I hates wizards,” said Koble. “I really hates wizards. So I am going to hit you, all right?”
He brought his fist back and let fly.
The wizard raised an eyebrow, yellow fire sprang up around the shellfish salesman, there was a noise like tearing silk, and Koble had vanished. All that was left was his boots, standing forlornly on the cobbles with little wisps of smoke coming out of them.
No one knows why smoking boots always remain, no matter how big the explosion. It seems to be just one of those things.
It seemed to the watchful eyes of Ardrothy that the wizard himself was nearly as shocked as the crowd, but he rallied magnificently and gave his staff a flourish.
“You people had better jolly well learn from this,” he said. “No one raises their hand to a wizard, do you understand? There are going to be a lot of changes around here. Yes, what do you want?”
This last comment was to Ardrothy, who was trying to sneak past unnoticed. He scrabbled quickly in his pie tray.
“I was just wondering if your honorship would care to purchase one of these finest pies,” he said hurriedly. “Full of nourish—”
“Watch closely, pie-selling person,” said the wizard. He stretched out his hand, made a strange gesture with his fingers, and produced a pie out of the air.
It was fat, golden-brown and beautifully glazed. Just by looking at it Ardrothy knew it was packed edge to edge with prime lean pork, with none of those spacious areas of good fresh air under the lid that represented his own profit margin. It was the kind of pie piglets hope to be when they grew up.
His heart sank. His ruin was floating in front of him with short-crust pastry on it.
“Want a taste?” said the wizard. “There’s plenty more where that came from.”
“Wherever it came from,” said Ardrothy.
He looked past the shiny pastry to the face of the wizard, and in the manic gleam of those eyes he saw the world turning upside down.
He turned away, a broken man, and set out for the nearest city gate.
As if it wasn’t bad enough that wizards were killing people, he thought bitterly, they were taking away their livelihood as well.
A bucket of water splashed into Rincewind’s face, jerking him out of a dreadful dream in which a hundred masked women were attempting to trim his hair with broadswords and cutting it very fine indeed. Some people, having a nightmare like that, would dismiss it as castration anxiety, but Rincewind’s subconscious knew being-cut-to-tiny-bits-mortal-dread when it saw it. It saw it most of the time.
He sat up.
“Are you all right?” said Conina, anxiously.
Rincewind swivelled his eyes around the cluttered deck.
“Not necessarily,” he said cautiously. There didn’t seem to be any black-clad slavers around, at least vertically. There were a good many crew members, all of them maintaining a respectful distance from Conina. Only the captain stood reasonably close, an inane grin on his face.
“They left,” said Conina. “Took what they could and left.”
“They bastards,” said the captain, “but they paddle pretty fast!” Conina winced as he gave her a ringing slap on the back. “She fight real good for a lady,” he added. “Yes!”
Rincewind got unsteadily to his feet. The boat was scudding along cheerfully toward a distant smear on the horizon that had to be hubward Klatch. He was totally unharmed. He began to cheer up a bit.
The captain gave them both a hearty nod and hurried off to shout orders connected with sails and ropes and things. Conina sat down on the Luggage, which didn’t seem to object.
“He said he’s so grateful he’ll take us all the way to Al Khali,” she said.
“I thought that’s what we arranged anyway,” said Rincewind. “I saw you give him money, and everything.”
“Yes, but he was planning to overpower us and sell me as a slave when he got there.”
“What, not sell me?” said Rincewind, and then snorted, “Of course, it’s the wizard’s robes, he wouldn’t dare—”
“Um. Actually, he said he’d have to give you away,” said Conina, picking intently at an imaginary splinter on the Luggage’s lid.
“Give me away?”
“Yes. Um. Sort of like, one free wizard with every concubine sold? Um.”
“I don’t see what vegetables have got to do with it.”
Conina gave him a long, hard stare, and when he didn’t break into a smile she sighed and said, “Why are you wizards always nervous around women?”
Rincewind bridled at this slur. “I like that!” he said, “I’ll have you know that—look, anyway, the point is, I get along very well with women in general, it’s just women with swords that upset me.” He considered this for a while, and added, “Everyone with swords upset me, if it comes to that.”
Conina picked industriously at the splinter. The Luggage gave a contented creak.
“I know something else that’ll upset you,” she muttered.
“Hmmm?”
“The hat’s gone.”
“What?”
“I couldn’t help it, they just grabbed whatever they could—”
“The slavers have made off with the hat?”
“Don’t you take that tone with me! I wasn’t having a quiet sleep at the time—”
Rincewind waved his hands frantically. “Nonono, don’t get excited, I wasn’t taking any tone—I want to think about this…”
“The captain says they’ll probably go back to Al Khali,” he heard Conina say. “There’s a place where the criminal element hang out, and we can soon—”
“I don’t see why we have to do anything,” said Rincewind. “The hat wanted to keep out the way of the University, and I shouldn’t think those slavers ever drop in there for a quick sherry.”
“You’ll let them run off with it?” said Conina, in genuine astonishment.
“Well, someone’s got to do it. The way I see it, why me?”
“But you said it’s the symbol of wizardry! What wizards all aspire to! You can’t just let it go like that!”
“You watch me.” Rincewind sat back. He felt oddly surprised. He was making a decision. It was his. It belonged to him. No-one was forcing him to make it. Sometimes it seemed that his entire life consisted of getting into trouble because of what other people wanted, but this time he’d made a decision and that was that. He’d get off the boat at Al Khali and find some way of going home. Someone else could save the world, and he wished them luck. He’d made a decision.
His brow furrowed. Why didn’t he feel happy about it?
Because it’s the wrong bloody decision, you idiot.
Right, he thought, I’ve had enough voices in my head. Out.
But I belong here.
You mean you’re me?
Your conscience.
Oh.
You can’t let the hat be destroyed. It’s the symbol…
…all right, I know…
…the symbol of magic under the Lore. Magic under the control of mankind. You don’t want to go back to those dark Ians…
…What?…
Ians…
Do I mean aeons?
Right. Aeons. Go back aeons to the time when raw magic ruled. The whole framework of reality trembled daily. It was pretty terrible, I can tell me.
How do I know?
Racial memory.
Gosh. Have I got one of those?
Well. A part of one.
Yes, all right, but why me?
In your soul you know you are a true wizard. The word “Wizard” is engraved on your heart.
“Yes, but the trouble is I keep meeting people who might try to find out,” said Rincewind miserably.
“What did you say?” said Conina.
Rincewind stared at the smudge on the horizon and sighed.
“Just talking to myself,” he said.
Carding surveyed the hat critically. He walked around the table and stared at it from a new angle. At last he said: “It’s pretty good. Where did you get the octarines?”
“They’re just very good Ankhstones,” said Spelter. “They fooled you, did they?”
It was a magnificent hat. In fact, Spelter had to admit, it looked a lot better than the real thing. The old Archchancellor’s hat had looked rather battered, its gold thread tarnished and unravelling. The replica was a considerable improvement. It had style.
“I especially like the lace,” said Carding.
“It took ages.”
“Why didn’t you try magic?” Carding waggled his fingers, and grasped the tall cool glass that appeared in mid-air. Under its paper umbrella and fruit salad it contained some sticky and expensive alcohol.
“Didn’t work,” said Spelter. “Just couldn’t seem, um, to get it right. I had to sew every sequin on by hand.” He picked up the hatbox.
Carding coughed into his drink. “Don’t put it away just yet,” he said, and took it out of the bursar’s hands. “I’ve always wanted to try this—”
He turned to the big mirror on the bursar’s wall and reverently lowered the hat on his rather grubby locks.
It was the ending of the first day of the sourcery, and the wizards had managed to change everything except themselves.
They had all tried, on the quiet and when they thought no one else was looking. Even Spelter had a go, in the privacy of his study. He had managed to become twenty years younger with a torso you could crack rocks on, but as soon as he stopped concentrating he sagged, very unpleasantly, back into his old familiar shape and age. There was something elastic about the way you were. The harder you threw it, the faster it came back. The worse it was when it hit, too. Spiked iron balls, broadswords and large heavy sticks with nails in were generally considered pretty fearsome weapons, but they were nothing at all compared to twenty years suddenly applied with considerable force to the back of the head.
This was because sourcery didn’t seem to work on things that were instrinsically magical. Nevertheless, the wizards had made a few important improvements. Carding’s robe, for example, had become a silk and lace confection of overpoweringly expensive tastelessness, and gave him the appearance of a big red jelly draped with antimacassars.
“It suits me, don’t you think?” said Carding. He adjusted the hat brim, giving it an inappropriately rakish air.
Spelter said nothing. He was looking out of the window.
There had been a few improvements all right. It had been a busy day.
The old stone walls had vanished. There were some rather nice railings now. Beyond them, the city fairly sparkled, a poem in white marble and red tiles. The river Ankh was no longer the silt-laden sewer he’d grown up knowing, but a glittering glass-clear ribbon in which—a nice touch—fat carp mouthed and swam in water pure as snowmelt.*
From the air Ankh-Morpork must have been blinding. It gleamed. The detritus of millennia had been swept away.
It made Spelter strangely uneasy. He felt out of place, as though he was wearing new clothes that itched. Of course, he was wearing new clothes and they did itch, but that wasn’t the problem. The new world was all very nice, it was exactly how it should be, and yet, and yet—had he wanted to change, he thought, or had he only wanted things rearranged more suitably?
“I said, don’t you think it was made for me?” said Carding.
Spelter turned back, his face blank.
“Um?”
“The hat, man.”
“Oh. Um. Very—suitable.”
With a sigh Carding removed the baroque headpiece and carefully replaced it in its box. “We’d better take it to him,” he said. “He’s starting to ask about it.”
“I’m still bothered about where the real hat is,” said Spelter.
“It’s in here,” said Carding firmly, tapping the lid.
“I mean the, um, real one.”
“This is the real one.”
“I meant—”
“This is the Archchancellor’s Hat,” said Carding carefully. “You should know, you made it.”
“Yes, but—” began the bursar wretchedly.
“After all, you wouldn’t make a forgery, would you?”
“Not as, um, such—”
“It’s just a hat. It’s whatever people think it is. People see the Archchancellor wearing it, they think it’s the original hat. In a certain sense, it is. Things are defined by what they do. And people, of course. Fundamental basis of wizardry, is that.” Carding paused dramatically, and plonked the hatbox into Spelter’s arms. “Cogitum ergot hatto, you might say.”
Spelter had made a special study of old languages, and did his best.
“‘I think, therefore I am a hat?’” he hazarded.
“What?” said Carding, as they set off down the stairs to the new incarnation of the Great Hall.
“‘I considered I’m a mad hat?’” Spelter suggested.
“Just shut up, all right?”
The haze still hung over the city, its curtains of silver and gold turned to blood by the light of the setting sun which streamed in through the windows of the hall.
Coin was sitting on a stool with his staff across his knees. It occurred to Spelter that he had never seen the boy without it, which was odd. Most wizards kept their staves under the bed, or hooked up over the fireplace.
He didn’t like this staff. It was black, but not because that was its color, more because it seemed to be a moveable hole into some other, more unpleasant set of dimensions. It didn’t have eyes but, nevertheless, it seemed to stare at Spelter as if it knew his innermost thoughts, which at the moment was more than he did.
His skin prickled as the two wizards crossed the floor and felt the blast of a raw magic flowing outward from the seated figure.
Several dozen of the most senior wizards were clustered around the stool, staring in awe at the floor.
Spelter craned to see, and saw—
The world.
It floated in a puddle of black night somehow set into the floor itself, and Spelter knew with a terrible certainty that it was the world, not some image or simple projection. There were cloud patterns and everything. There were the frosty wastes of the Hublands, the Counterweight Continent, the Circle Sea, the Rimfall, all tiny and pastel-colored but nevertheless real…
Someone was speaking to him.
“Um?” he said, and the sudden drop in metaphorical temperature jerked him back into reality. He realized with horror that Coin had just directed a remark at him.
“I’m sorry?” he corrected himself. “It was just that the world…so beautiful…”
“Our Spelter is an aesthete,” said Coin, and there was a brief chuckle from one or two wizards who knew what the word meant, “but as to the world, it could be improved. I had said, Spelter, that everywhere we look we can see cruelty and inhumanity and greed, which tell us that the world is indeed governed badly, does it not?”
Spelter was aware of two dozen pairs of eyes turning to him.
“Um,” he said. “Well, you can’t change human nature.”
There was dead silence.
Spelter hesitated. “Can you?” he said.
“That remains to be seen,” said Carding. “But if we change the world, then human nature also will change. Is that not so, brothers?”
“We have the city,” said one of the wizards. “I myself have created a castle—”
“We rule the city, but who rules the world?” said Carding. “There must be a thousand petty kings and emperors and chieftains down there.”
“Not one of whom can read without moving his lips,” said a wizard.
“The Patrician could read,” said Spelter.
“Not if you cut off his index finger,” said Carding. “What happened to the lizard, anyway? Never mind. The point is, the world should surely be run by men of wisdom and philosophy. It must be guided. We’ve spent centuries fighting amongst ourselves, but together…who knows what we could do?”
“Today the city, tomorrow the world,” said someone at the back of the crowd.
Carding nodded.
“Tomorrow the world, and—” he calculated quickly—“on Friday the universe!”
That leaves the weekend free, thought Spelter. He recalled the box in his arms, and held it out toward Coin. But Carding floated in front of him, seized the box in one fluid movement and offered it to the boy with a flourish.
“The Archchancellor’s hat,” he said. “Rightfully yours, we think.”
Coin took it. For the first time Spelter saw uncertainty cross his face.
“Isn’t there some sort of formal ceremony?” he said.
Carding coughed.
“I—er, no,” he said. “No, I don’t think so.” He glanced up at the other senior mages, who shook their heads. “No. We’ve never had one. Apart from the feast, of course. Er. You see, it’s not like a coronation, the Archchancellor, you see, he leads the fraternity of wizards, he’s,” Carding’s voice ran down slowly in the light of that golden gaze, “he’s you see…he’s the…first…among…equals…”
He stepped back hurriedly as the staff moved eerily until it pointed toward him. Once again Coin seemed to be listening to an inner voice.
“No,” he said eventually, and when he spoke next his voice had that wide, echoing quality that, if you are not a wizard, you can only achieve with a lot of very expensive audio equipment. “There will be a ceremony. There must be a ceremony, people must understand that wizards are ruling, but it will not be here. I will select a place. And all the wizards who have passed through these gates will attend, is that understood?”
“Some of them live far off,” said Carding, carefully. “It will take them some time to travel, so when were you thinking of—”
“They are wizards!” shouted Coin. “They can be here in the twinkling of an eye! I have given them the power! Besides,” his voice dropped back to something like normal pitch, “the University is finished. It was never the true home of magic, only its prison. I will build us a new place.”
He lifted the new hat out of its box, and smiled at it. Spelter and Carding held their breath.
“But—”
They looked around. Hakardly the Lore master had spoken, and now stood with his mouth opening and shutting.
Coin turned to him, one eyebrow raised.
“You surely don’t mean to close the University?” said the old wizard, his voice trembling.
“It is no longer necessary,” said Coin. “It’s a place of dust and old books. It is behind us. Is that not so…brothers?”
There was a chorus of uncertain mumbling. The wizards found it hard to imagine life without the old stones of UU. Although, come to think of it, there was a lot of dust, of course, and the books were pretty old…
“After all…brothers…who among you has been into your dark library these past few days? The magic is inside you now, not imprisoned between covers. Is that not a joyous thing? Is there not one among you who has done more magic, real magic, in the past twenty-four hours than he has done in the whole of his life before? Is there one among you who does not, in his heart of hearts, truly agree with me?”
Spelter shuddered. In his heart of hearts an inner Spelter had woken, and was struggling to make himself heard. It was a Spelter who suddenly longed for those quiet days, only hours ago, when magic was gentle and shuffled around the place in old slippers and always had time for a sherry and wasn’t like a hot sword in the brain and, above all, didn’t kill people.
Terror seized him as he felt his vocal chords twang to attention and prepare, despite all his efforts, to disagree.
The staff was trying to find him. He could feel it searching for him. It would vanish him, just like poor old Billias. He clamped his jaws together, but it wouldn’t work. He felt his chest heave. His jaw creaked.
Carding, shifting uneasily, stood on his foot. Spelter yelped.
“Sorry,” said Carding.
“Is something the matter, Spelter?” said Coin.
Spelter hopped on one leg, suddenly released, his body flooding with relief as his toes flooded with agony, more grateful than anyone in the entire history of the world that seventeen stones of wizardry had chosen his instep to come down heavily on.
His scream seemed to have broken the spell. Coin sighed, and stood up.
“It has been a good day,” he said.
It was two o’clock in the morning. River mists coiled like snakes through the streets of Ankh-Morpork, but they coiled alone. Wizards did not hold with other people staying up after midnight, and so no one did. They slept the troubled sleep of the enchanted, instead.
In the Plaza of Broken Moons, once the boutique of mysterious pleasures from whose flare-lit and curtain-hung stalls the late-night reveller could obtain anything from a plate of jellied eels to the venereal disease of his choice, the mists coiled and dripped into chilly emptiness.
The stalls had gone, replaced by gleaming marble and a statue depicting the spirit of something or other, surrounded by illuminated fountains. Their dull splashing was the only sound that broke the cholesterol of silence that had the heart of the city in its grip.
Silence reigned too in the dark bulk of Unseen University. Except—
Spelter crept along the shadowy corridors like a two-legged spider, darting—or at least limping quickly—from pillar to archway, until he reached the forbidding doors of the Library. He peered nervously at the darkness around him and, after some hesitation, tapped very, very lightly.
Silence poured from the heavy woodwork. But, unlike the silence that had the rest of the city under its thrall, this was a watchful, alert silence; it was the silence of a sleeping cat that had just opened one eye.
When he could bear it no longer Spelter dropped to his hands and knees and tried to peer under the doors. Finally he put his mouth as close as he could to the drafty, dusty gap under the bottommost hinge and whispered: “I say! Um. Can you hear me?”
He felt sure that something moved, far back in the darkness.
He tried again, his mood swinging between terror and hope with every erratic thump of his heart.
“I say? It’s me, um, Spelter. You know? Could you speak to me, please?”
Perhaps large leathery feet were creeping gently across the floor in there, or maybe it was only the creaking of Spelter’s nerves. He tried to swallow away the dryness in his throat, and had another go.
“Look, all right, but, look, they’re talking about shutting the Library!”
The silence grew louder. The sleeping cat had cocked an ear.
“What is happening is all wrong!” the bursar confided, and clapped his hand over his mouth at the enormity of what he had said.
“Oook?”
It was the faintest of noises, like the eructation of cockroaches.
Suddenly emboldened, Spelter pressed his lips closer to the crack.
“Have you got the, um, Patrician in there?”
“Oook.”
“What about the little doggie?”
“Oook.”
“Oh. Good.”
Spelter lay full length in the comfort of the night, and drummed his fingers on the chilly floor.
“You wouldn’t care to, um, let me in too?” he ventured.
“Oook!”
Spelter made a face in the gloom.
“Well, would you, um, let me come in for a few minutes? We need to discuss something urgently, man to man.”
“Eeek.”
“I meant ape.”
“Oook.”
“Look, won’t you come out, then?”
“Oook.”
Spelter sighed. “This show of loyalty is all very well, but you’ll starve in there.”
“Oook oook.”
“What other way in?”
“Oook.”
“Oh, have it your way,” Spelter sighed. But, somehow, he felt better for the conversation. Everyone else in the University seemed to be living in a dream, whereas the Librarian wanted nothing more in the whole world than soft fruit, a regular supply of index cards and the opportunity, every month or so, to hop over the wall of the Patrician’s private menagerie.* It was strangely reassuring.
“So you’re all right for bananas and so forth?” he inquired, after another pause.
“Oook.”
“Don’t let anyone in, will you? Um. I think that’s frightfully important.”
“Oook.”
“Good.” Spelter stood up and dusted off his knees. Then he put his mouth to the keyhole and added, “Don’t trust anyone.”
“Oook.”
It was not completely dark in the Library, because the serried rows of magical books gave off a faint octarine glow, caused by thaumaturgical leakage into a strong occult field. It was just bright enough to illuminate the pile of shelves wedged against the door.
The former Patrician had been carefully decanted into a jar on the Librarian’s desk. The Librarian himself sat under it, wrapped in his blanket and holding Wuffles on his lap.
Occasionally he would eat a banana.
Spelter, meanwhile, limped back along the echoing passages of the University, heading for the security of his bedroom. It was because his ears were nervously straining the tiniest of sounds out of the air that he heard, right on the cusp of audibility, the sobbing.
It wasn’t a normal noise up here. In the carpeted corridors of the senior wizards’ quarters there were a number of sounds you might hear late at night, such as snoring, the gentle clinking of glasses, tuneless singing and, once in a while, the zip and sizzle of a spell gone wrong. But the sound of someone quietly crying was such a novelty that Spelter found himself edging down the passage that led to the Archchancellor’s suite.
The door was ajar. Telling himself that he really shouldn’t, tensing himself for a hurried dash, Spelter peered inside.
Rincewind stared.
“What is it?” he whispered.
“I think it’s a temple of some sort,” said Conina.
Rincewind stood and gazed upwards, the crowds of Al Khali bouncing off and around him in a kind of human Brownian motion. A temple, he thought. Well, it was big, and it was impressive, and the architect had used every trick in the book to make it look even bigger and even more impressive than it was, and to impress upon everyone looking at it that they, on the other hand, were very small and ordinary and didn’t have as many domes. It was the kind of place that looked exactly as you were always going to remember it.
But Rincewind felt he knew holy architecture when he saw it, and the frescoes on the big and, of course, impressive walls above him didn’t look at all religious. For one thing, the participants were enjoying themselves. Almost certainly, they were enjoying themselves. Yes, they must be. It would be pretty astonishing if they weren’t.
“They’re not dancing, are they?” he said, in a desperate attempt not to believe the evidence of his own eyes. “Or maybe it’s some sort of acrobatics?”
Conina squinted upwards in the hard, white sunlight.
“I shouldn’t think so,” she said, thoughtfully.
Rincewind remembered himself. “I don’t think a young woman like you should be looking at this sort of thing,” he said sternly.
Conina gave him a smile. “I think wizards are expressly forbidden to,” she said sweetly. “It’s supposed to turn you blind.”
Rincewind turned his face upwards again, prepared to risk maybe one eye. This sort of thing is only to be expected, he told himself. They don’t know any better. Foreign countries are, well, foreign countries. They do things differently there.
Although some things, he decided, were done in very much the same way, only with rather more inventiveness and, by the look of it, far more often.
“The temple frescoes of Al Khali are famous far and wide,” said Conina, as they walked through crowds of children who kept trying to sell Rincewind things and introduce him to nice relatives.
“Well, I can see they would be,” Rincewind agreed. “Look, push off, will you? No, I don’t want to buy whatever it is. No, I don’t want to meet her. Or him, either. Or it, you nasty little boy. Get off, will you?”
The last scream was to the group of children riding sedately on the Luggage, which was plodding along patiently behind Rincewind and making no attempt to shake them off. Perhaps it was sickening for something, he thought, and brightened up a bit.
“How many people are there on this continent, do you think?” he said.
“I don’t know,” said Conina, without turning round. “Millions, I expect?”
“If I were wise, I wouldn’t be here,” said Rincewind, with feeling.
They had been in Al Khali, gateway to the whole mysterious continent of Klatch, for several hours. He was beginning to suffer.
A decent city should have a bit of fog about it, he considered, and people should live indoors, not spend all their time out on the streets. There shouldn’t be all this sand and heat. As for the wind…
Ankh-Morpork had its famous smell, so full of personality that it could reduce a strong man to tears. But Al Khali had its wind, blowing from the vastness of the deserts and continents nearer the rim. It was a gentle breeze, but it didn’t stop and eventually it had the same effect on visitors that a cheese-grater achieves on a tomato. After a while it seemed to have worn away your skin and was rasping directly across the nerves.
To Conina’s sensitive nostrils it carried aromatic messages from the heart of the continent, compounded of the chill of deserts, the stink of lions, the compost of jungles and the flatulence of wildebeest.
Rincewind, of course, couldn’t smell any of this. Adaptation is a wonderful thing, and most Morporkians would be hard put to smell a burning feather mattress at five feet.
“Where to next?” he said. “Somewhere out of the wind?”
“My father spent some time in Khali when he was hunting for the Lost City of Ee,” said Conina. “And I seem to remember he spoke very highly of the soak. It’s a kind of bazaar.”
“I suppose we just go and look for the second-hand hat stalls,” said Rincewind. “Because the whole idea is totally—”
“What I was hoping was that maybe we could be attacked. That seems the most sensible idea. My father said that very few strangers who entered the soak ever came out again. Some very murderous types hang out there, he said.”
Rincewind gave this due consideration.
“Just run that by me again, will you?” he said. “After you said we should be attacked I seemed to hear a ringing in my ears.”
“Well, we want to meet the criminal element, don’t we?”
“Not exactly want,” said Rincewind. “That wasn’t the phrase I would have chosen.”
“How would you put it, then?”
“Er. I think the phrase ‘not want’ sums it up pretty well.”
“But you agreed that we should get the hat!”
“But not die in the process,” said Rincewind, wretchedly. “That won’t do anyone any good. Not me, anyway.”
“My father always said that death is but a sleep,” said Conina.
“Yes, the hat told me that,” said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls. “But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.”
“Look,” said Conina, “there’s not much risk. You’re with me.”
“Yes, and you’re looking forward to it, aren’t you,” said Rincewind accusingly, as Conina piloted them along a shady alley, with their retinue of pubescent entrepreneurs at their heels. “It’s the old herrydeterry at work.”
“Just shut up and try to look like a victim, will you?”
“I can do that all right,” said Rincewind, beating off a particularly stubborn member of the Junior Chamber of Commerce, “I’ve had a lot of practice. For the last time, I don’t want to buy anyone, you wretched child!”
He looked gloomily at the walls around them. At least there weren’t any of those disturbing pictures here, but the hot breeze still blew the dust around him and he was sick and tired of looking at sand. What he wanted was a couple of cool beers, a cold bath and a change of clothing; it probably wouldn’t make him feel better, but it would at least make feeling awful more enjoyable. Not that there was any beer here, probably. It was a funny thing, but in chilly cities like Ankh-Morpork the big drink was beer, which cooled you down, but in places like this, where the whole sky was an over with the door left open, people drank tiny little sticky drinks which set fire to the back of your throat. And the architecture was all wrong. And they had statues in their temples that, well, just weren’t suitable. This wasn’t the right kind of place for wizards. Of course, they had some local grown alternative, enchanters or some such, but not what you’d call decent magic…
Conina strolled ahead of him, humming to herself.
You rather like her, don’t you? I can tell, said a voice in his head.
Oh blast, thought Rincewind, you’re not my conscience again, are you?
Your libido. It’s a bit stuffy in here, isn’t it? You haven’t had it done up since the last time I was around.
Look, go away, will you? I’m a wizard! Wizards are ruled by their heads, not by their hearts!
And I’m getting votes from your glands, and they’re telling me that as far as your body is concerned your brain is in a minority of one.
Yes? But it’s got the casting vote, then.
Hah! That’s what you think. Your heart has got nothing to do with this, by the way, it’s merely a muscular organ which powers the circulation of the blood. But look at it like this—you quite like her, don’t you?
Well…Rincewind hesitated. Yes, he thought, er…
She’s pretty good company, eh? Nice voice?
Well, of course…
You’d like to see more of her?
Well…Rincewind realized with some surprise that, yes, he would. It wasn’t that he was entirely unused to the company of women, but it always seemed to cause trouble and, of course, it was a well known fact that it was bad for the magical abilities, although he had to admit that his particular magical abilities, being approximately those of a rubber hammer, were shaky enough to start with.
Then you’ve got nothing to lose, have you? his libido put in, in an oily tone of thought.
It was at this point Rincewind realized that something important was missing. It took him a little while to realize what it was.
No one had tried to sell him anything for several minutes. In Al Khali, that probably meant you were dead.
He, Conina and the Luggage were alone in a long, shady alley. He could hear the bustle of the city some way away, but immediately around them there was nothing except a rather expectant silence.
“They’ve run off,” said Conina.
“Are we going to be attacked?”
“Could be. There’s been three men following us on the rooftops.”
Rincewind squinted upwards at almost the same time as three men, dressed in flowing black robes, dropped lightly into the alleyway in front of them. When he looked around two more appeared from around a corner. All five were holding long curved swords and, although the lower halves of their faces were masked, it was almost certain that they were grinning evilly.
Rincewind rapped sharply on the Luggage’s lid.
“Kill,” he suggested. The Luggage stood stock still for a moment, and then plodded over and stood next to Conina. It looked slightly smug and, Rincewind realized with jealous horror, rather embarrassed.
“Why, you—” he growled, and gave it a kick—“you handbag.”
He sidled closer to the girl, who was standing there with a thoughtful smile on her face.
“What now?” he said. “Are you going to offer them all a quick perm?”
The men edged a little closer. They were, he noticed, only interested in Conina.
“I’m not armed,” she said.
“What happened to your legendary comb?”
“Left it on the boat.”
“You’ve got nothing?”
Conina shifted slightly to keep as many of the men as possible in her field of vision.
“I’ve got a couple of hairclips,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
“Any good?”
“Don’t know. Never tried.”
“You got us into this!”
“Relax. I think they’ll just take us prisoner.”
“Oh, that’s fine for you to say. You’re not marked down as this week’s special offer.”
The Luggage snapped its lid once or twice, a little uncertain about things. One of the men gingerly extended his sword and prodded Rincewind in the small of the back.
“They want to take us somewhere, see?” said Conina. She gritted her teeth. “Oh, no,” she muttered.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I can’t do it!”
“What?”
Conina put her head in her hands. “I can’t let myself be taken prisoner without a fight! I can feel a thousand barbarian ancestors accusing me of betrayal!” she hissed urgently.
“Pull the other one.”
“No, really. This won’t take a minute.”
There was a sudden blur and the nearest man collapsed in a small gurgling heap. Then Conina’s elbows went back and into the stomachs of the men behind her. Her left hand rebounded past Rincewind’s ear with a noise like tearing silk and felled the man behind him. The fifth made a run for it and was brought down by a flying tackle, hitting his head heavily on the wall.
Conina rolled off him and sat up, panting, her eyes bright.
“I don’t like to say this, but I feel better for that,” she said. “It’s terrible to know that I betrayed a fine hairdressing tradition, of course. Oh.”
“Yes,” said Rincewind somberly, “I wondered if you’d noticed them.”
Conina’s eyes scanned the line of bowmen who had appeared along the opposite wall. They had that stolid, impassive look of people who have been paid to do a job, and don’t much mind if the job involves killing people.
“Time for those hairclips,” said Rincewind.
Conina didn’t move.
“My father always said that it was pointless to undertake a direct attack against an enemy extensively armed with efficient projectile weapons,” she said.
Rincewind, who knew Cohen’s normal method of speech, gave her a look of disbelief.
“Well, what he actually said,” she added, “was never enter an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine.”
Spelter couldn’t face breakfast.
He wondered whether he ought to talk to Carding, but he had a chilly feeling that the old wizard wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t believe him anyway. In fact he wasn’t quite sure he believed it himself…
Yes he was. He’d never forget it, although he intended to make every effort.
One of the problems about living in the University these days was that the building you went to sleep in probably wasn’t the same building when you woke up. Rooms had a habit of changing and moving around, a consequence of all this random magic. It built up in the carpets, charging up the wizards to such an extent that shaking hands with somebody was a sure-fire way of turning them into something. The build up of magic, in fact, was overflowing the capacity of the area to hold it. If something wasn’t done about it soon, then even the common people would be able to use it—a chilling thought but, since Spelter’s mind was already so full of chilling thoughts you could use it as an ice tray, not one he was going to spend much time worrying about.
Mere household geography wasn’t the only difficulty, though. Sheer pressure of thaumaturgical inflow was even affecting the food. What was a forkful of kedgeree when you lifted it off the plate might well have turned into something else by the time it entered your mouth. If you were lucky, it was inedible. If you were unlucky, it was edible but probably not something you liked to think you were about to eat or, worse, had already eaten half of.
Spelter found Coin in what had been, late last night, a broom cupboard. It was a lot bigger now. It was only because Spelter had never heard of aircraft hangars that he didn’t know what to compare it with, although, to be fair, very few aircraft hangars have marble floors and a lot of statuary around the place. A couple of brooms and a small battered bucket in one corner looked distinctly out of place, but not as out of place as the crushed tables in the former Great Hall which, owing to the surging tides of magic now flowing through the place, had shrunk to the approximate size of what Spelter, if he had ever seen one, would have called a small telephone booth.
He sidled into the room with extreme caution and took his place among the council of wizards. The air was greasy with the feel of power.
Spelter created a chair beside Carding and leaned across to him.
“You’ll never believe—” he began.
“Quiet!” hissed Carding. “This is amazing!”
Coin was sitting on his stool in the middle of the circle, one hand on his staff, the other extended and holding something small, white and egg-like. It was strangely fuzzy. In fact, Spelter thought, it wasn’t something small seen close to. It was something huge, but a long way off. And the boy was holding it in his hand.
“What’s he doing?” Spelter whispered.
“I’m not exactly sure,” murmured Carding. “As far as we can understand it, he’s creating a new home for wizardry.”
Streamers of colored light flashed about the indistinct ovoid, like a distant thunderstorm. The glow lit Coin’s preoccupied face from below, giving it the semblance of a mask.
“I don’t see how we will all fit in,” the bursar said. “Carding, last night I saw—”
“It is finished,” said Coin. He held up the egg, which flashed occasionally from some inner light and gave off tiny white prominences. Not only was it a long way off, Spelter thought, it was also extremely heavy; it went right through heaviness and out the other side, into that strange negative realism where lead would be a vacuum. He grabbed Carding’s sleeve again.
“Carding, listen, it’s important, listen, when I looked in—”
“I really wish you’d stop doing that.”
“But the staff, his staff, it’s not—”
Coin stood up and pointed the staff at the wall, where a doorway instantly appeared. He marched out through it, leaving the wizards to follow him.
He went through the Archchancellor’s garden, followed by a gaggle of wizards in the same way that a comet is followed by its tail, and didn’t stop until he reached the banks of the Ankh. There were some hoary old willows here, and the river flowed, or at any rate moved, in a horseshoe bend around a small newthaunted meadow known rather optimistically as Wizards Pleasaunce. On summer evenings, if the wind was blowing toward the river, it was a nice area for an afternoon stroll.
The warm silver haze still hung over the city as Coin padded through the damp grass until he reached the center. He tossed the egg, which drifted in a gentle arc and landed with a squelch.
He turned to the wizards as they hurried up.
“Stand well back,” he commanded. “And be prepared to run.”
He pointed the octiron staff at the half-sunken thing. A bolt of octarine light shot from its tip and struck the egg, exploding into a shower of sparks that left blue and purple after-images.
There was a pause. A dozen wizards watched the egg expectantly.
A breeze shook the willow trees in a totally unmysterious way.
Nothing else happened.
“Er—” Spelter began.
And then came the first tremor. A few leaves fell out of the trees and some distant water bird took off in fright.
The sound started as a low groaning, experienced rather than heard, as though everyone’s feet had suddenly become their ears. The trees trembled, and so did one or two wizards.
The mud around the egg began to bubble.
And exploded.
The ground peeled back like lemon rind. Gouts of steaming mud spattered the wizards as they dived for the cover of the trees. Only Coin, Spelter and Carding were left to watch the sparkling white building arise from the meadow, grass and dirt pouring off it. Other towers erupted from the ground behind them; buttresses grew through the air, linking tower with tower.
Spelter whimpered when the soil flowed away from around his feet, and was replaced by flagstones flecked with silver. He lurched as the floor rose inexorably, carrying the three high above the treetops.
The rooftops of the University went past and fell away below them. Ankh-Morpork spread out like a map, the river a trapped snake, the plains a misty blur. Spelter’s ears popped, but the climb went on, into the clouds.
They emerged drenched and cold into blistering sunlight with the cloud cover spreading away in every direction. Other towers were rising around them, glinting painfully in the sharpness of the day.
Carding knelt down awkwardly and felt the floor gingerly. He signalled to Spelter to do the same.
Spelter touched a surface that was smoother than stone. It felt like ice would feel if ice was slightly warm, and looked like ivory. While it wasn’t exactly transparent, it gave the impression that it would like to be.
He got the distinct feeling that, if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to feel it at all.
He met Carding’s gaze.
“Don’t look at, um, me,” he said. “I don’t know what it is either.”
They looked up at Coin, who said: “It’s magic.”
“Yes, lord, but what is it made of?” said Carding.
“It is made of magic. Raw magic. Solidified. Curdled. Renewed from second to second. Could you imagine a better substance to build the new home of sourcery?”
The staff flared for a moment, melting the clouds. The Discworld appeared below them, and from up here you could see that it was indeed a disc, pinned to the sky by the central mountain of Cori Celesti, where the gods lived. There was the Circle Sea, so close that it might even be possible to dive into it from here; there was the vast continent of Klatch, squashed by perspective. The Rimfall around the edge of the world was a sparkling curve.
“It’s too big,” said Spelter under his breath. The world he had lived in hadn’t stretched much further than the gates of the University, and he’d preferred it that way. A man could be comfortable in a world that size. He certainly couldn’t be comfortable about being half a mile in the air standing on something that wasn’t, in some fundamental way, there.
The thought shocked him. He was a wizard, and he was worrying about magic.
He sidled cautiously back toward Carding, who said: “It isn’t exactly what I expected.”
“Um?”
“It looks a lot smaller up here, doesn’t it.”
“Well, I don’t know. Listen, I must tell you—”
“Look at the Ramtops, now. You could almost reach out and touch them.”
They stared out across two hundred leagues toward the towering mountain range, glittering and white and cold. It was said that if you travelled hubwards through the secret valleys of the Ramtops, you would find, in the frozen lands under Cori Celesti itself, the secret realm of the Ice Giants, imprisoned after their last great battle with the gods. In those days the mountains had been mere islands in a great sea of ice, and ice lived on them still.
Coin smiled his golden smile.
“What did you say, Carding?” he said.
“It’s the clear air, lord. And they look so close and small. I only said I could almost touch them—”
Coin waved him into silence. He extended one thin arm, rolling back his sleeve in the traditional sign that magic was about to be performed without trickery. He reached out, and then turned back with his fingers closed around what was, without any shadow of a doubt, a handful of snow.
The two wizards observed it in stunned silence as it melted and dripped onto the floor.
Coin laughed.
“You find it so hard to believe?” he said. “Shall I pick pearls from rim-most Krull, or sand from the Great Nef? Could your old wizardry do half as much?”
It seemed to Spelter that his voice took on a metallic edge. He stared intently at their faces.
Finally Carding sighed and said rather quietly, “No. All my life I have sought magic, and all I found was colored lights and little tricks and old, dry books. Wizardry has done nothing for the world.”
“And if I tell you that I intend to dissolve the Orders and close the University? Although, of course, my senior advisors will be accorded all due status.”
Carding’s knuckles whitened, but he shrugged.
“There is little to say,” he said. “What good is a candle at noonday?”
Coin turned to Spelter. So did the staff. The filigree carvings were regarding him coldly. One of them, near the top of the staff, looked unpleasantly like an eyebrow.
“You’re very quiet, Spelter. Do you not agree?”
No. The world had sourcery once, and gave it up for wizardry. Wizardry is magic for men, not gods. It’s not for us. There was something wrong with it, and we have forgotten what it was. I liked wizardry. It didn’t upset the world. It fitted. It was right. A wizard was all I wanted to be.
He looked down at his feet.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“Good,” said Coin, in a satisfied tone of voice. He strolled to the edge of the tower and looked down at the street map of Ankh-Morpork far below. The Tower of Art came barely a tenth of the way toward them.
“I believe,” he said, “I believe that we will hold the ceremony next week, at full moon.”
“Er. It won’t be full moon for three weeks,” said Carding.
“Next week,” Coin repeated. “If I say the moon will be full, there will be no argument.” He continued to stare down at the model buildings of the University, and then pointed.
“What’s that?”
Carding craned.
“Er. The Library. Yes. It’s the Library. Er.”
The silence was so oppressive that Carding felt something more was expected of him. Anything would be better than that silence.
“It’s where we keep the books, you know. Ninety thousand volumes, isn’t it, Spelter?”
“Um? Oh. Yes. About ninety thousand, I suppose.”
Coin leaned on the staff and stared.
“Burn them,” he said. “All of them.”
Midnight strutted its black stuff along the corridors of Unseen University as Spelter, with rather less confidence, crept cautiously toward the impassive doors of the Library. He knocked, and the sound echoed so loudly in the empty building that he had to lean against the wall and wait for his heart to slow down a bit.
After a while he heard a sound like heavy furniture being moved about.
“Oook?”
“It’s me.”
“Oook?”
“Spelter.”
“Oook.”
“Look, you’ve got to get out! He’s going to burn the Library!”
There was no reply.
Spelter let himself sag to his knees.
“He’ll do it, too,” he whispered. “He’ll probably make me do it, it’s that staff, um, it knows everything that’s going on, it knows that I know about it…please help me…”
“Oook?”
“The other night, I looked into his room…the staff, the staff was glowing, it was standing there in the middle of the room like a beacon and the boy was on the bed sobbing, I could feel it reaching out, teaching him, whispering terrible things, and then it noticed me, you’ve got to help me, you’re the only one who isn’t under the—”
Spelter stopped. His face froze. He turned around very slowly, without willing it, because something was gently spinning him.
He knew the University was empty. The wizards had all moved into the New Tower, where the lowliest student had a suite more splendid than any senior mage had before.
The staff hung in the air a few feet away. It was surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
He stood up very carefully and, keeping his back to the stonework and his eyes firmly fixed on the thing, slithered gingerly along the wall until he reached the end of the corridor. At the corner he noted that the staff, while not moving had revolved on its axis to follow him.
He gave a little cry, grasped the skirts of his robe, and ran.
The staff was in front of him. He slid to a halt and stood there, catching his breath.
“You don’t frighten me,” he lied, and turned on his heel and marched off in a different direction, snapping his fingers to produce a torch that burned with a fine white flame (only its penumbra of octarine proclaimed it to be of magical origin).
Once again, the staff was in front of him. The light of his torch was sucked into a thin, singing steam of white fire that flared and vanished with a “pop.”
He waited, his eyes watering with blue after-images, but if the staff was still there it didn’t seem to be inclined to take advantage of him. When vision returned he felt he could make out an even darker shadow on his left. The stairway down to the kitchens.
He darted for it, leaping down the unseen steps and landing heavily and unexpectedly on uneven flags. A little moonlight filtered through a grating in the distance and somewhere up there, he knew, was a doorway into the outside world.
Staggering a little, his ankles aching, the noise of his own breath booming in his ears as though he’d stuck his entire head in a seashell, Spelter set off across the endless dark desert of the floor.
Things clanked underfoot. There were no rats here now, of course, but the kitchen had fallen into disuse lately—the University’s cooks had been the best in the world, but now any wizard could conjure up meals beyond mere culinary skill. The big copper pans hung neglected on the wall, their sheen already tarnishing, and the kitchen ranges under the giant chimney arch were filled with nothing but chilly ash…
The staff lay across the back door like a bar. It spun up as Spelter tottered toward it and hung, radiating quiet malevolence, a few feet away. Then, quite smoothly, it began to glide toward him.
He backed away, his feet slipping on the greasy stones. A thump across the back of his things made him yelp, but as he reached behind him he found it was only one of the chopping blocks.
His hand groped desperately across its scarred surface and, against all hope, found a cleaver buried in the wood. In an instinctive gesture as ancient as mankind, Spelter’s fingers closed around its handle.
He was out of breath and out of patience and out of space and time and also scared, very nearly, out of his mind.
So when the staff hovered in front of him he wrenched the chopper up and around with all the strength he could muster….
And hesitated. All that was wizardly in him cried out against the destruction of so much power, power that perhaps even now could be used, used by him…
And the staff swung around so that its axis was pointing directly at him.
And several corridors away, the Librarian stood braced with his back against the Library door, watching the blue and white flashes that flickered across the floor. He heard the distant snap of raw energy, and a sound that started low and ended up in zones of pitch that even Wuffles, lying with his paws over his head, could not hear.
And then there was a faint, ordinary tinkling noise, such as might be made by a fused and twisted metal cleaver dropping onto flagstones.
It was the sort of noise that makes the silence that comes after it roll forward like a warm avalanche.
The Librarian wrapped the silence around him like a cloak and stood staring up at the rank on rank of books, each one pulsing faintly in the glow of its own magic. Shelf after shelf looked down* at him. They had heard. He could feel the fear.
The orangutan stood statue-still for several minutes, and then appeared to reach a decision. He knuckled his way across to his desk and, after much rummaging, produced a heavy key-ring bristling with keys. Then he went back and stood in the middle of the floor and said, very deliberately, “Oook.”
The books craned forward on their shelves. Now he had their full attention.
“What is this place?” said Conina.
Rincewind looked around him, and made a guess.
They were still in the heart of Al Khali. He could hear the hum of it beyond the walls. But in the middle of the teeming city someone had cleared a vast space, walled it off, and planted a garden so romantically natural that it looked as real as a sugar pig.
“It looks like someone has taken twice five miles of inner, city and girdled them around with walls and towers,” he hazarded.
“What a strange idea,” said Conina.
“Well, some of the religions here—well, when you die, you see, they think you go to this sort of garden, where there’s all this sort of music and, and,” he continued, wretchedly, “sherbet and, and—young women.”
Conina took in the green splendor of the walled garden, with its peacocks, intricate arches and slightly wheezy fountains. A dozen reclining women stared back at her, impassively. A hidden string orchestra was playing the complicated Klatchian bhong music.
“I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m sure I would have remembered. Besides, this isn’t my idea of paradise.” She looked critically at the reclining figures, and added, “I wonder who does their hair?”
A sword point prodded her in the small of the back, and the two of them set out along the ornate path toward a small domed pavilion surrounded by olive trees. She scowled.
“Anyway, I don’t like sherbet.”
Rincewind didn’t comment. He was busily examining the state of his own mind, and wasn’t happy at the sight of it. He had a horrible feeling that he was falling in love.
He was sure he had all the symptoms. There were the sweaty palms, the hot sensation in the stomach, the general feeling that the skin of his chest was made of tight elastic. There was the feeling every time Conina spoke, that someone was running hot steel into his spine.
He glanced down at the Luggage, tramping stoically alongside him, and recognized the symptoms.
“Not you, too?” he said.
Possibly it was only the play of sunlight on the Luggage’s battered lid, but it was just possible that for an instant it looked redder than usual.
Of course, sapient pearwood has this sort of weird mental link with its owner…Rincewind shook his head. Still, it’d explain why the thing wasn’t its normal malignant self.
“It’d never work,” he said. “I mean, she’s a female and you’re a, well, you’re a—” He paused. “Well, whatever you are, you’re of the wooden persuasion. It’d never work. People would talk.”
He turned and glared at the black-robed guards behind him.
“I don’t know what you’re looking at,” he said severely.
The Luggage sidled over to Conina, following her so closely that she banged an ankle on it.
“Push off,” she snapped, and kicked it again, this time on purpose.
Insofar as the Luggage ever had an expression, it looked at her in shocked betrayal.
The pavilion ahead of them was an ornate onion-shaped dome, studded with precious stones and supported on four pillars. Its interior was a mass of cushions on which lay a rather fat, middle-aged man surrounded by three young women. He wore a purple robe interwoven with gold thread; they, as far as Rincewind could see, demonstrated that you could make six small saucepan lids and a few yards of curtain netting go a long way although—he shivered—not really far enough.
The man appeared to be writing. He glanced up at them.
“I suppose you don’t know a good rhyme for ‘thou’?” he said peevishly.
Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.
“Plough?” said Rincewind. “Bough?”
“Cow?” suggested Conina, with forced brightness.
The man hesitated. “Cow I quite like,” he said, “Cow has got possibilities. Cow might, in fact, do. Do pull up a cushion, by the way. Have some sherbet. Why are you standing there like that?”
“It’s these ropes,” said Conina.
“I have this allergy to cold steel,” Rincewind added.
“Really, how tiresome,” said the fat man, and clapped a pair of hands so heavy with rings that the sound was more of a clang. Two guards stepped forward smartly and cut the bonds, and then the whole battalion melted away, although Rincewind was acutely conscious of dozens of dark eyes watching them from the surrounding foliage. Animal instinct told him that, while he now appeared to be alone with the man and Conina, any aggressive moves on his part would suddenly make the world a sharp and painful place. He tried to radiate tranquillity and total friendliness. He tried to think of something to say.
“Well,” he ventured, looking around at the brocaded hangings, the ruby-studded pillars and the gold filigree cushions, “you’ve done this place up nicely. It’s—” he sought for something suitably descriptive—“well, pretty much of a miracle of rare device.”
“One aims for simplicity,” sighed the man, still scribbling busily. “Why are you here? Not that it isn’t always a pleasure to meet fellow students of the poetic muse.”
“We were brought here,” said Conina.
“Men with swords,” added Rincewind.
“Dear fellows, they do so like to keep in practice. Would you like one of these?”
He snapped his fingers at one of the girls.
“Not, er, right now,” Rincewind began, but she’d picked up a plate of golden-brown sticks and demurely passed it toward him. He tried one. It was delicious, a sort of sweet crunchy flavor with a hint of honey. He took two more.
“Excuse me,” said Conina, “but who are you? And where is this?”
“My name is Creosote, Seriph of Al Khali,” said the fat man, “and this is my Wilderness. One does one’s best.”
Rincewind coughed on his honey stick.
“Not Creosote as in ‘As rich as Creosote’?” he said.
“That was my dear father. I am, in fact, rather richer. When one has a great deal of money, I am afraid, it is hard to achieve simplicity. One does one’s best.” He sighed.
“You could try giving it away,” said Conina.
He sighed again. “That isn’t easy, you know. No, one just has to try to do a little with a lot.”
“No, no, but look,” said Rincewind spluttering bits of stick, “they say, I mean, everything you touch turns into gold, for goodness sake.”
“That could make going to the lavatory a bit tricky,” said Conina brightly. “Sorry.”
“One hears such stories about oneself,” said Creosote, affecting not to have heard. “So tiresome. As if wealth mattered. True riches lie in the treasure houses of literature.”
“The Creosote I heard of,” said Conina slowly, “was head of this band of, well, mad killers. The original Assassins, feared throughout hubward Klatch. No offense meant.”
“Ah yes, dear father,” said Creosote junior. “The hashishim. Such a novel ideal.* But not really very efficient. So we hired Thugs instead.”
“Ah. Named after a religious sect,” said Conina knowingly.
Creosote gave her a long look. “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think so. I think we named them after the way they push people’s faces through the back of their heads. Dreadful, really.”
He picked up the parchment he had been writing on, and continued, “I seek a more cerebral life, which is why I had the city center converted into a Wilderness. So much better for the mental flow. One does one’s best. May I read you my latest oeuvre?”
“Egg?” said Rincewind, who wasn’t following this.
Creosote thrust out one pudgy hand and declaimed as follows:
“A summer palace underneath the bough,
A flask of wine, a loaf of bread, some lamb couscous
with courgettes, roast peacock tongues, kebabs, iced
sherbet, selection of sweets from the trolley and
choice of Thou,
Singing beside me in the Wilderness,
And Wilderness is—”
He paused, and picked up his pen thoughtfully.
“Maybe cow isn’t such a good idea,” he said. “Now that I come to look at it—”
Rincewind glanced at the manicured greenery, carefully arranged rocks and high surrounding walls. One of the Thous winked at him.
“This is a Wilderness?” he said.
“My landscape gardeners incorporated all the essential features, I believe. They spent simply ages getting the rills sufficiently sinuous. I am reliably informed that they contain prospects of rugged grandeur and astonishing natural beauty.”
“And scorpions,” said Rincewind, helping himself to another honey stick.
“I don’t know about that,” said the poet. “Scorpions sound unpoetic to me. Wild honey and locusts seem more appropriate, according to the standard poetic instructions, although I’ve never really developed the taste for insects.”
“I always understood that the kind of locust people ate in wildernesses was the fruit of a kind of tree,” said Conina. “Father always said it was quite tasty.”
“Not insects?” said Creosote.
“I don’t think so.”
The Seriph nodded at Rincewind. “You might as well finish them up, then,” he said. “Nasty crunchy things, I couldn’t see the point.”
“I don’t wish to sound ungrateful,” said Conina, over the sound of Rincewind’s frantic coughing. “But why did you have us brought here?”
“Good question.” Creosote looked at her blankly for a few seconds, as if trying to remember why they were there.
“You really are a most attractive young woman,” he said. “You can’t play a dulcimer, by any chance?”
“How many blades has it got?” said Conina.
“Pity,” said the Seriph, “I had one specially imported.”
“My father taught me to play the harmonica,” she volunteered.
Creosote’s lips moved soundlessly as he tried out the idea.
“No good,” he said. “Doesn’t scan. Thanks all the same, though.” He gave her another thoughtful look. “You know, you really are most becoming. Has anyone ever told you your neck is as a tower of ivory?”
“Never,” said Conina.
“Pity,” said Creosote again. He rummaged among his cushions and produced a small bell, which he rang.
After a while a tall, saturnine figure appeared from behind the pavilion. He had the look of someone who could think his way through a corkscrew without bending, and a certain something about the eyes which would have made the average rabid rodent tiptoe away, discouraged.
That man, you would have said, has got Grand Vizier written all over him. No one can tell him anything about defrauding widows and imprisoning impressionable young men in alleged jewel caves. When it comes to dirty work he probably wrote the book or, more probably, stole it from someone else.
He wore a turban with a pointy hat sticking out of it. He had a long thin mustache, of course.
“Ah, Abrim,” said Creosote.
“Highness?”
“My Grand Vizier,” said the Seriph.
—thought so—, said Rincewind to himself.
“These people, why did we have them brought here?”
The vizier twirled his mustache, probably foreclosing another dozen mortgages.
“The hat, highness,” he said. “The hat, if you remember.”
“Ah, yes. Fascinating. Where did we put it?”
“Hold on,” said Rincewind urgently. “This hat…it wouldn’t be a sort of battered pointy one, with lots of stuff on it? Sort of lace and stuff, and, and—” he hesitated—“no one’s tried to put it on, have they?”
“It specifically warned us not to,” said Creosote, “so Abrim got a slave to try it on, of course. He said it gave him a headache.”
“It also told us that you would shortly be arriving,” said the vizier, bowing slightly at Rincewind, “and therefore I—that is to say, the Seriph felt that you might be able to tell us more about this wonderful artifact?”
There is a tone of voice known as interrogative, and the vizier was using it; a slight edge to his words suggested that, if he didn’t learn more about the hat very quickly, he had various activities in mind in which further words like “red hot” and “knives” would appear. Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There’s probably a school somewhere.
“Gosh, I’m glad you’ve found it,” said Rincewind, “That hat is gngngnh—”
“I beg your pardon?” said Abrim, signalling a couple of lurking guards to step forward. “I missed the bit after the young lady—” he bowed at Conina—“elbowed you in the ear.”
“I think,” said Conina, politely but firmly, “you better take us to see it.”
Five minutes later, from its resting place on a table in the Seriph’s treasury, the hat said, At last. What kept you?
It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration.
For example, the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled back through his pages of verse to revise the lines which begin:
“Get up! For morning in the cup of day,
Has dropped the spoon that scares the stars away.”
—and he has sighed, because the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them.
It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.
Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time.
It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the elevator, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.*
This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.
Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.
For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.
By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of white horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succour and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration therefore fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contribution to the field of tone poetry.
Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.
And so Creosote, who had dreamt the inspiration for a rather fine poem about life and philosophy and how they both look much better through the bottom of a wine glass, was totally unable to do anything about it because he had as much poetic ability as a hyena.
Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.
Actually, the flash of inspiration needed to explain it clearly and precisely has taken place, but the creature who received it—a small female bluetit—has never been able to make the position clear, even after some really strenuous coded messages on the tops of milk bottles. By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables.
Which brings us rather neatly onto the subject of magic.
A long way out in the dark gulfs of interstellar space, one single inspiration particle is clipping along unaware of its destiny, which is just as well, because its destiny is to strike, in a matter of hours, a tiny area of Rincewind’s mind.
It would be a tough destiny even if Rincewind’s creative node was a reasonable size, but the particle’s karma had handed it the problem of hitting a moving target the size of a small raisin over a distance of several hundred lightyears. Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.
If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn’t, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.
The Seriph’s palace, known to legend as the Rhoxie, occupied most of the center of Al Khali that wasn’t occupied by the wilderness. Most things connected with Creosote were famed in mythology and the arched, domed, many-pillared palace was said to have more rooms than any man had been able to count. Rincewind didn’t know which number he was in.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” said Abrim the vizier.
He prodded Rincewind in the ribs.
“You’re a wizard,” he said. “Tell me what it does.”
“How do you know I’m a wizard?” said Rincewind desperately.
“It’s written on your hat,” said the vizier.
“Ah.”
“And you were on the boat with it. My men saw you.”
“The Seriph employs slavers?” snapped Conina. “That doesn’t sound very simple!”
“Oh, I employ the slavers. I am the vizier, after all,” said Abrim. “It is rather expected of me.”
He gazed thoughtfully at the girl, and then nodded at a couple of the guards.
“The current Seriph is rather literary in his views,” he said. “I, on the other hand, am not. Take her to the seraglio, although,” he rolled his eyes and gave an irritable sigh, “I’m sure the only fate that awaits her there is boredom, and possibly a sore throat.”
He turned to Rincewind.
“Don’t say anything,” he said. “Don’t move your hands. Don’t try any sudden feats of magic. I am protected by strange and powerful amulets.”
“Now just hold on a minute—” Rincewind began, and Conina said, “All right. I’ve always wondered what a harem looked like.”
Rincewind’s mouth went on opening and shutting, but no sounds came out. Finally he managed, “Have you?”
She waggled an eyebrow at him. It was probably a signal of some sort. Rincewind felt he ought to have understood it, but peculiar passions were stirring in the depths of his being. They weren’t actually going to make him brave, but they were making him angry. Speeded up, the dialogue behind his eyes was going something like this:
Ugh.
Who’s that?
Your conscience. I feel terrible. Look, they’re marching her off to the harem.
Rather her than me, thought Rincewind, but without much conviction.
Do something!
There’s too many guards! They’ll kill me!
So they’ll kill you, it’s not the end of the world.
It will be for me, thought Rincewind grimly.
But just think how good you’ll feel in your next life—
Look, just shut up, will I? I’ve had just about enough of me.
Abrim stepped across to Rincewind and looked at him curiously.
“Who are you talking to?” he said.
“I warn you,” said Rincewind, between clenched teeth, “I have this magical box on legs which is absolutely merciless with attackers, one word from me and—”
“I’m impressed,” said Abrim. “Is it invisible?”
Rincewind risked a look behind him.
“I’m sure I had it when I came in,” he said, and sagged.
It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind.
Abrim walked slowly around the table on which sat the hat, twirling his mustache.
“Once again,” he said, “I ask you: this is an artifact of power, I feel it, and you must tell me what it does.”
“Why don’t you ask it?” said Rincewind.
“It refuses to tell me.”
“Well, why do you want to know?”
Abrim laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it.
“You’re a wizard,” he said. “Wizardry is about power. I have taken an interest in magic myself. I have the talent, you know.” The vizier drew himself up stiffly. “Oh, yes. But they wouldn’t accept me at your University. They said I was mentally unstable, can you believe that?”
“No,” said Rincewind, truthfully. Most of the wizards at Unseen had always seemed to him to be several bricks short of a shilling. Abrim seemed pretty normal wizard material.
Abrim gave him an encouraging smile.
Rincewind looked sideways at the hat. It said nothing. He looked back at the vizier. If the laughter had been weird, the smile made it sound as normal as birdsong. It looked as though the vizier had learned it from diagrams.
“Wild horses wouldn’t get me to help you in any way,” he said.
“Ah,” said the vizier. “A challenge.” He beckoned to the nearest guard.
“Do we have any wild horses in the stables?”
“Some fairly angry ones, master.”
“Infuriate four of them and take them to the turnwise courtyard. And, oh, bring several lengths of chain.”
“Right away, master.”
“Um. Look,” said Rincewind.
“Yes?” said Abrim.
“Well, if you put it like that…”
“You wish to make a point?”
“It’s the Archchancellor’s hat, if you must know,” said Rincewind. “The symbol of wizardry.”
“Powerful?”
Rincewind shivered. “Very,” he said.
“Why is it called the Archchancellor’s hat?”
“The Archchancellor is the most senior wizard, you see. The leader. But, look—”
Abrim picked up the hat and turned it around and around in his hands.
“It is, you might say, the symbol of office?”
“Absolutely, but look, if you put it on, I’d better warn you—”
Shut up.
Abrim leapt back, the hat dropping to the floor.
The wizard knows nothing. Send him away. We must negotiate.
The vizier stared down at the glittering octarines around the hat.
“I negotiate? With an item of apparel?”
I have much to offer, on the right head.
Rincewind was appalled. It has already been indicated that he had the kind of instinct for danger usually found only in certain small rodents, and it was currently battering on the side of his skull in an attempt to run away and hide somewhere.
“Don’t listen!” he shouted.
Put me on, said the hat beguilingly, in an ancient voice that sounded as though the speaker had a mouthful of felt.
If there really was a school for viziers, Abrim had come top of the class.
“We’ll talk first,” he said. He nodded at the guards, and pointed to Rincewind.
“Take him away and throw him in the spider tank,” he said.
“No, not spiders, on top of everything else!” moaned Rincewind.
The captain of the guard stepped forward and knuckled his forehead respectfully.
“Run out of spiders, master,” he said.
“Oh.” The vizier looked momentarily blank. “In that case, lock him in the tiger cage.”
The guard hesitated, trying to ignore the sudden outburst of whimpering beside him. “The tiger’s been ill, master. Backward and forward all night.”
“Then throw this snivelling coward down the shaft of eternal fire!”
A couple of the guards exchanged glances over the head of Rincewind, who had sunk to his knees.
“Ah. We’ll need a bit of notice of that, master—”
“—to get it going again, like.”
The vizier’s fist came down hard on the table. The captain of the guard brightened up horribly.
“There’s the snake pit, master,” he said. The other guards nodded. There was always the snake pit.
Four heads turned toward Rincewind, who stood up and brushed the sand off his knees.
“How do you feel about snakes?” said one of the guards.
“Snakes? I don’t like snakes much—”
“The snake pit,” said Abrim.
“Right. The snake pit,” agreed the guards.
“—I mean, some snakes are okay—” Rincewind continued, as two guards grabbed him by the elbows.
In fact there was only one very cautious snake, which remained obstinately curled up in a corner of the shadowy pit watching Rincewind suspiciously, possibly because he reminded it of a mongoose.
“Hi,” it said eventually. “Are you a wizard?”
As a line of snake dialogue this was a considerable improvement on the normal string of esses, but Rincewind was sufficiently despondent not to waste time wondering and simply replied, “It’s on my hat, can’t you read?”
“In seventeen languages, actually. I taught myself.”
“Really?”
“I sent off for courses. But I try not to read, of course. It’s not in character.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t be.” It was certainly the most cultured snake voice that Rincewind had ever heard.
“It’s the same with the voice, I’m afraid,” the snake added. “I shouldn’t really be talking to you now. Not like this, anyway. I suppose I could grunt a bit. I rather think I should be trying to kill you, in fact.”
“I have curious and unusual powers,” said Rincewind. Fair enough, he thought, an almost total inability to master any form of magic is pretty unusual for a wizard and anyway, it doesn’t matter about lying to a snake.
“Gosh. Well, I expect you won’t be in here long, then.”
“Hmm?”
“I expect you’ll be levitating out of here like a shot, any minute.”
Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.
“I might,” he said cautiously.
“In that case, you wouldn’t mind taking me with you, would you?”
“Eh?”
“It’s a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it’s the pits.”
“Take you? But you’re a snake, it’s your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things.”
A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.
“That’s a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone,” it said.
The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.
It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.
To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word “emaciated.” He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.
Rincewind looked again.
He had been right the first time.
The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes—a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, you’d see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you’d never see another one wearing—
The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.
“I can’t help it,” he said. “I promised my mother.”
“Woolly underwear?”
Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city’s astronomers, but that wasn’t the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn’t the strangest thing.
The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.
The occupants watched it for some time, sipping their coffee laced with desert orakh. This drink, made from cacti sap and scorpion venom, is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe, but the desert nomads don’t drink it for its intoxicating effects. They use it because they need something to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee.
Not because you could use the coffee to waterproof roofs. Not because it went through the untrained stomach lining like a hot ball bearing through runny butter. What it did was worse.
It made you knurd.*
The sons of the desert glanced suspiciously into their thimble-sized coffee-cups, and wondered whether they had overdone the orakh. Were they all seeing the same thing? Would it be foolish to pass a remark? These are the sort of things you need to worry about if you want to retain any credibility as a steely-eyed son of the deep desert. Pointing a shaking finger and saying, “Hey, look, a box just walked in here on hundreds of little legs, isn’t that extraordinary!” would show a terrible and possibly fatal lack of machismo.
The drinkers tried not to catch one another’s eye, even when the Luggage slid up to the row of orakh jars against the far wall. The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.
Finally one of them said, “I think it wants a drink.”
There was a long silence, and then one of the others said, with the precision of a chess Grand Master making a killing move, “What does?”
The rest of the drinkers gazed impassively into their glasses.
There was no sound for a while other than the plopplopping of a gecko’s footsteps across the sweating ceiling.
The first drinker said, “The demon that’s just moved up behind you is what I was referring to, O brother of the sands.”
The current holder of the All-Wadi Imperturbability Championship smiled glassily until he felt a tugging on his robe. The smile stayed where it was but the rest of his face didn’t seem to want to be associated with it.
The Luggage was feeling crossed in love and was doing what any sensible person would do in these circumstances, which was get drunk. It had no money and no way of asking for what it wanted, but the Luggage somehow never had much difficulty in making itself understood.
The tavern keeper spent a very long lonely night filling a saucer with orakh, before the Luggage rather unsteadily walked out through one of the walls.
The desert was silent. It wasn’t normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the hell out of it.
“I promised my mother,” said the boy. “I get these colds, you see.”
“Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?”
“Oh, I couldn’t do that. You’ve got to wear all this leather stuff.”
“I wouldn’t call it all,” said Rincewind. “There’s not enough of it to call it all. Why have you got to wear it?”
“So people know I’m a barbarian hero, of course.”
Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.
Barbarian hero,” he murmured.
“It’s all right, isn’t it? All this leather stuff was very expensive.”
“Yes, but, look—what’s your name, lad?”
“Nijel—”
“You see, Nijel—”
“Nijel the Destroyer,” Nijel added.
“You see, Nijel—”
“—the Destroyer—”
“All right, the Destroyer—” said Rincewind desperately.
“—son of Harebut the Provision Merchant—”
“What?”
“You’ve got to be the son of someone,” Nijel explained. “It says it here somewhere—” He half-turned and fumbled inside a grubby fur bag, eventually bringing out a thin, torn and grubby book.
“There’s a bit in here about selecting your name,” he muttered.
“How come you ended up in this pit, then?”
“I was intending to steal from Creosote’s treasury, but I had an asthma attack,” said Nijel, still fumbling through the crackling pages.
Rincewind looked down at the snake, which was still trying to keep out of everyone’s way. It had a good thing going in the pit, and knew trouble when it saw it. It wasn’t about to cause any irritation for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.
“How long have you been a barbarian hero?”
“I’m just getting started. I’ve always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along.” Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“It’s a desperate sort of life, by all accounts,” Rincewind volunteered.
“Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?” Nijel muttered darkly.
Rincewind thought.
“Is lettuce involved?” he said.
“Oh yes,” said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.
Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do.
“Do you know any lamp wick jokes?” he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.
“I don’t think so,” said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.
“I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp wick?”
“This slab moves,” said Nijel. “Look, it’s a sort of door. Give me a hand.”
He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.
“I expect it’s some sort of secret passage,” he added. “Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It’s stuck.”
“Don’t you want to hear the rest of the joke?” said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.
“I think not right at the moment,” said Nijel. “I think I would prefer a bit of magical assistance.”
“I’m not very good at it,” said Rincewind. “Never got the hang of it, see, it’s more than just pointing a finger at it and saying ‘Kazam—’”
There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smashing it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.
After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.
“Yes,” he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. “Well. Very good. We’ll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going.”
He cleared his throat a bit.
“Nnh,” said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm’s length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn’t got longer arms.
Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.
“It seems to open into some kind of room,” he said.
“Nnh.”
“After you,” said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.
The wizard staggered forward, bumped his head on the rock and didn’t appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.
Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. “Can you feel something?” he said. “Should the stone be trembling?”
“Nnh.”
“Are you all right?”
“Nnh.”
Nijel put his ear to the stones. “There’s a very strange noise,” he said. “A sort of humming.” A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.
Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.
Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noise and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.
If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.
A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.
Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and bumped into him standing, surrounded by an octarine corona, in another cave.
Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flashing eyes and floating hair.
He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.
Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.
“I say,” said Nijel, “are you all right?”
“Nnh,” said Rincewind, and the syllable turned into a large doughnut.
“You don’t look all right,” said Nijel with what might be called, in the circumstances, unusual perspicacity.
“Nnh.”
“Why not try getting us out of here?” Nijel added, and wisely flung himself flat on the floor.
Rincewind nodded like a puppet and pointed his loaded digit at the ceiling, which melted like ice under a blowlamp.
Still the rumbling went on, sending its disquieting harmonics dancing through the palace. It is a well-known factoid that there are frequencies that can cause panic, and frequencies that can cause embarrassing incontinence, but the shaking rock was resonating at the frequency that causes reality to melt and run out at the corners.
Nijel regarded the dripping ceiling and cautiously tasted it.
“Lime custard,” he said, and added, “I suppose there’s no chance of stairs, is there?”
More fire burst from Rincewind’s ravaged fingers, coalescing into an almost perfect escalator, except that possibly no other moving staircase in the universe was floored with alligator skin.
Nijel grabbed the gently spinning wizard and leapt aboard.
Fortunately they had reached the top before the magic vanished, very suddenly.
Sprouting out of the center of the palace, shattering rooftops like a mushroom bursting through an ancient pavement, was a white tower taller than any other building in Al Khali.
Huge double doors had opened at its base and out of them, striding along as though they owned the place, were dozens of wizards. Rincewind thought he could recognize a few faces, faces which he’d seen before bumbling vaguely in lecture theaters or peering amiably at the world in the University grounds. They weren’t faces built for evil. They didn’t have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.
Nijel pulled back behind a handy wall. He found himself looking into Rincewind’s worried eyes.
“Hey, that’s magic!”
“I know,” said Rincewind, “It’s not right!” Nijel peered up at the sparkling tower.
“But—”
“It feels wrong,” said Rincewind. “Don’t ask me why.”
Half a dozen of the Seriph’s guards erupted from an arched doorway and plunged toward the wizards, their headlong rush made all the more sinister by their ghastly battle silences. For a moment their swords flashed in the sunlight, and then a couple of the wizards turned, extended their hands and—
Nijel looked away.
“Urgh,” he said.
A few curved swords dropped onto the cobbles.
“I think we should very quietly go away,” said Rincewind.
“But didn’t you see what they just turned them into?”
“Dead people,” said Rincewind. “I know. I don’t want to think about it.”
Nijel thought he’d never stop thinking about it, especially around 3 a.m. on windy nights. The point about being killed by magic was that it was much more inventive than, say, steel; there were all sorts of interesting new ways to die, and he couldn’t put out of his mind the shapes he’d seen, just for an instant, before the wash of octarine fire had mercifully engulfed them.
“I didn’t think wizards were like that,” he said, as they hurried down a passageway. “I thought they were more, well, more silly than sinister. Sort of figures of fun.”
“Laugh that one off, then,” muttered Rincewind.
“But they just killed them, without even—”
“I wish you wouldn’t go on about it. I saw it as well.”
Nijel drew back. His eyes narrowed.
“You’re a wizard, too,” he said accusingly.
“Not that kind I’m not,” said Rincewind shortly.
“What kind are you, then?”
“The non-killing kind.”
“It was the way they looked at them as if it just didn’t matter—” said Nijel, shaking his head. “That was the worst bit.”
“Yes.”
Rincewind dropped the single syllable heavily in front of Nijel’s train of thought, like a tree trunk. The boy shuddered, but at least he shut up. Rincewind actually began to feel sorry for him, which was very unusual—he normally felt he needed all his pity for himself.
“Is that the first time you’ve seen someone killed?” he said.
“Yes.”
“Exactly how long have you been a barbarian hero?”
“Er. What year is this?”
Rincewind peered around a corner, but such people as were around and vertical were far too busy panicking to bother about them.