“Out on the road, then?” he said quietly. “Lost track of time? I know how it is. This is the Year of the Hyena.”

“Oh. In that case, about—” Nijel’s lips moved soundlessly—“about three days. Look,” he added quickly, “how can people kill like that? Without even thinking about it?”

“I don’t know,” said Rincewind, in a tone of voice that suggested he was thinking about it.

“I mean, even when the vizier had me thrown in the snake pit, at least he seemed to be taking an interest.”

“That’s good. Everyone should have an interest.”

“I mean, he even laughed!”

“Ah. A sense of humor, too.”

Rincewind felt that he could see his future with the same crystal clarity that a man falling off a cliff sees the ground, and for much the same reason. So when Nijel said: “They just pointed their fingers without so much as—,” Rincewind snapped: “Just shut up, will you? How do you think I feel about it? I’m a wizard, too!”

“Yes, well, you’ll be all right then,” muttered Nijel.

It wasn’t a heavy blow, because even in a rage Rincewind still had muscles like tapioca, but it caught the side of Nijel’s head and knocked him down more by the weight of surprise than its intrinsic energy.

“Yes, I’m a wizard all right,” Rincewind hissed. “A wizard who isn’t much good at magic! I’ve managed to survive up till now by not being important enough to die! And when all wizards are hated and feared, exactly how long do you think I’ll last?”

“That’s ridiculous!”

Rincewind couldn’t have been more taken aback if Nijel had struck him.

“What?”

“Idiot! All you have to do is stop wearing that silly robe and get rid of that daft had and no one will even know you’re a wizard!”

Rincewind’s mouth opened and shut a few times as he gave a very lifelike impression of a goldfish trying to grasp the concept of tap-dancing.

“Stop wearing the robe?” he said.

“Sure. All those tatty sequins and things, it’s a total giveaway,” said Nijel, struggling to his feet.

“Get rid of the hat?”

“You’ve got to admit that going around with ‘wizzard’ written on it is a bit of a heavy hint.”

Rincewind gave him a worried grin.

“Sorry,” he said, “I don’t quite follow you—”

“Just get rid of them. It’s easy enough, isn’t it? Just drop them somewhere and then you could be a, a, well, whatever. Something that isn’t a wizard.”

There was a pause, broken only by the distant sounds of fighting.

“Er,” said Rincewind, and shook his head. “You’ve lost me there…”

“Good grief, it’s perfectly simple to understand!”

“…not sure I quite catch your drift…” murmured Rincewind, his face ghastly with sweat.

“You can just stop being a wizard.”

Rincewind’s lips moved soundlessly as he replayed every word, one at a time, then all at once.

“What?” he said, and then he said, “Oh.”

“Got it? Want to try it one more time?”

Rincewind nodded gloomily.

“I don’t think you understand. A wizard isn’t what you do, it’s what you are. If I wasn’t a wizard, I wouldn’t be anything.” He took off his hat and twiddled nervously with the loose star on its point, causing a few more cheap sequins to part company.

“I mean, it’s got wizard written on my hat,” he said. “It’s very important—”

He stopped and stared at the hat.

“Hat,” he said vaguely, aware of some importunate memory pressing its nose up against the windows of his mind.

“It’s a good hat,” said Nijel, who felt that something was expected of him.

“Hat,” said Rincewind again, and then added, “the hat! We’ve got to get the hat!”

“You’ve got the hat,” Nijel pointed out.

“Not this hat, the other hat. And Conina!”

He took a few random steps along a passageway, and then sidled back.

“Where do you suppose they are?” he said.

“Who?”

“There’s a magic hat I’ve got to find. And a girl.”

“Why?”

“It might be rather difficult to explain. I think there might be screaming involved somewhere.”

Nijel didn’t have much of a jaw but, such as it was, he stuck it out.

“There’s a girl needs rescuing?” he said grimly.

Rincewind hesitated. “Someone will probably need rescuing,” he admitted. “It might possibly be her. Or at least in her vicinity.”

“Why didn’t you say so? This is more like it, this is what I was expecting. This is what heroism is all about. Let’s go!”

There was another crash, and the sound of people yelling.

“Where?” said Rincewind.

“Anywhere!”

Heroes usually have an ability to rush madly around crumbling palaces they hardly know, save everyone and get out just before the whole place blows up or sinks into the swamp. In fact Nijel and Rincewind visited the kitchens, assorted throne rooms, the stables (twice) and what seemed to Rincewind like several miles of corridor. Occasionally groups of black-clad guards would scurry past them, without so much as a second glance.

“This is ridiculous,” said Nijel. “Why don’t we ask someone? Are you all right?”

Rincewind leaned against a pillar decorated with embarrassing sculpture and wheezed.

“You could grab a guard and torture the information out of him,” he said, gulping air. Nijel gave him an odd look.

“Wait here,” he said, and wandered off until he found a servant industriously ransacking a cupboard.

“Excuse me,” he said, “which way to the harem?”

“Turn left three doors down,” said the man, without looking around.

“Right.”

He wandered back again and told Rincewind.

“Yes, but did you torture him?”

“No.”

“That wasn’t very barbaric of you, was it?”

“Well, I’m working up to it,” said Nijel. “I mean, I didn’t say ‘thank you’.”

Thirty seconds later they pushed aside a heavy bead curtain and entered the seraglio of the Seriph of Al Khali.

There were gorgeous songbirds in cages of gold filigree. There were tinkling fountains. There were pots of rare orchids through which humming-birds skimmed like tiny, brilliant jewels. There were about twenty young women wearing enough clothes for, say, about half a dozen, huddled together in a silent crowd.

Rincewind had eyes for none of this. That is not to say that the sight of several dozen square yards of hip and thigh in every shade from pink to midnight black didn’t start certain tides flowing deep in the crevasses of his libido, but they were swamped by the considerably bigger flood of panic at the sight of four guards turning toward him with scimitars in their hands and the light of murder in their eyes.

Without hesitation, Rincewind took a step backwards.

“Over to you, friend,” he said.

“Right!”

Nijel drew his sword and held it out in front of him, his arms trembling at the effort.

There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life.

“Erm,” he said, “excuse me…”

“It seems a shame,” said a small wizard.

The others didn’t speak. It was a shame, and there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t hear the hot whine of guilt all down their backbones. But, as so often happens by that strange alchemy of the soul, the guilt made them arrogant and reckless.

“Just shut up, will you?” said the temporary leader. He was called Benado Sconner, but there is something in the air tonight that suggests that it is not worth committing his name to memory. The air is dark and heavy and full of ghosts.

The Unseen University isn’t empty, there just aren’t any people there.

But of course the six wizards sent to burn down the Library aren’t afraid of ghosts, because they’re so charged with magic that they practically buzz as they walk, they’re wearing robes more splendid than any Archchancellor has worn, their pointy hats are more pointed than any hats have hitherto been, and the reason they’re standing so close together is entirely coincidental.

“It’s awfully dark in here,” said the smallest of the wizards.

“It’s midnight,” said Sconner sharply, “and the only dangerous things in here are us. Isn’t that right, boys?”

There was a chorus of vague murmurs. They were all in awe of Sconner, who was rumored to do positive-thinking exercises.

“And we’re not scared of a few old books, are we, lads?” He glowered at the smallest wizard. “You’re not, are you?” he added sharply.

“Me? Oh. No. Of course not. They’re just paper, like he said,” said the wizard quickly.

“Well, then.”

“There’s ninety thousand of them, mind,” said another wizard.

“I always heard there was no end to ’em,” said another. “It’s all down to dimensions, I heard, like what we see is only the tip of the whatever, you know, the thing that is mostly underwater—”

“Hippopotamus?”

“Alligator?”

“Ocean?”

“Look, just shut up, all of you!” shouted Sconner. He hesitated. The darkness seemed to suck at the sound of his voice. It packed the air like feathers.

He pulled himself together a bit.

“Right, then,” he said, and turned toward the forbidding doors of the Library.

He raised his hands, made a few complicated gestures in which his fingers, in some eye-watering way, appeared to pass through each other, and shattered the doors into sawdust.

The waves of silence poured back again, strangling the sound of falling woodchips.

There was no doubt that the doors were smashed. Four forlorn hinges hung trembling from the frame, and a litter of broken benches and shelves lay in the wreckage. Even Sconner was a little surprised.

“There,” he said. “It’s as easy as that. You see? Nothing happened to me. Right?”

There was a shuffling of curly-toed boots. The darkness beyond the doorway was limned with the indistinct, eye-aching glow of thaumaturgic radiation as possibility particles exceeded the speed of reality in a strong magical field.

“Now then,” said Sconner, brightly, “who would like the honor of setting the fire?”

Ten silent seconds later he said, “In that case I will do it myself. Honestly, I might as well be talking to the wall.”

He strode through the doorway and hurried across the floor to the little patch of starlight that lanced down from the glass dome high above the center of the Library (although, of course, there has always been considerable debate about the precise geography of the place; heavy concentrations of magic distort time and space, and it is possible that the Library doesn’t even have an edge, never mind a center).

He stretched out his arms.

“There. See? Absolutely nothing has happened. Now come on in.”

The other wizards did so, with great reluctance and a tendency to duck as they passed through the ravished arch.

“Okay,” said Sconner, with some satisfaction. “Now, has everyone got their matches as instructed? Magical fire won’t work, not on these books, so I want everyone to—”

“Something moved up there,” said the smallest wizard.

Sconner blinked.

“What?”

“Something moved up by the dome,” said the wizard, adding by way of explanation, “I saw it.”

Sconner squinted upwards into the bewildering shadows, and decided to exert a bit of authority.

“Nonsense,” he said briskly. He pulled out a bundle of foul-smelling yellow matches, and said, “Now, I want you all to pile—”

“I did see it, you know,” said the small wizard, sulkily.

“All right, what did you see?”

“Well, I’m not exactly—”

“You don’t know, do you?” snapped Sconner.

“I saw someth—”

“You don’t know!” repeated Sconner, “You’re just seeing shadows, just trying to undermine my authority, isn’t that it?” Sconner hesitated, and his eyes glazed momentarily. “I am calm,” he intoned, “I am totally in control. I will not let—”

“It was—”

“Listen, shortarse, you can just jolly well shut up, all right?”

One of the other wizards, who had been staring upwards to conceal his embarrassment, gave a strangled little cough.

“Er, Sconner—”

“And that goes for you too!” Sconner pulled himself to his full, bristling height and flourished the matches.

“As I was saying,” he said, “I want you to light the matches and—I suppose I’ll have to show you how to light matches, for the benefit of shortarse there—and I’m not out of the window, you know. Good grief. Look at me. You take a match—”

He lit a match, the darkness blossomed into a ball of sulphurous white light, and the Librarian dropped on him like the descent of Man.

They all knew the Librarian, in the same definite but diffused way that people know walls and floors and all the other minor but necessary scenery on the stage of life. If they recall him at all, it was as a sort of gentle mobile sigh, sitting under his desk repairing books, or knuckling his way among the shelves in search of secret smokers. Any wizard unwise enough to hazard a clandestine rollup wouldn’t know anything about it until a soft leathery hand reached up and removed the offending homemade, but the Librarian never made a fuss, he just looked extremely hurt and sorrowful about the whole sad business and then ate it.

Whereas what was now attempting with considerable effort to unscrew Sconner’s head by the ears was a screaming nightmare with its lips curled back to reveal long yellow fangs.

The terrified wizards turned to run and found themselves bumping into bookshelves that had unaccountably blocked the aisles. The smallest wizard yelped and rolled under a table laden with atlases, and lay with his hands over his ears to block out the dreadful sounds as the remaining wizards tried to escape.

Eventually there was nothing but silence, but it was that particularly massive silence created by something moving very stealthily, as it might be, in search of something else. The smallest wizard ate the tip of his hat out of sheer terror.

The silent mover grabbed him by the leg and pulled him gently but firmly out into the open, where he gibbered a bit with his eyes shut and then, when ghastly teeth failed to meet in his throat, ventured a quick glance.

The Librarian picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him reflectively a foot off the ground, just out of reach of a small and elderly wire-haired terrier who was trying to remember how to bite people’s ankles.

“Er—” said the wizard, and was then thrown in an almost flat trajectory through the broken doorway, where his fall was broken by the floor.

After a while a shadow next to him said, “Well, that’s it, then. Anyone seen that daft bastard Sconner?”

And a shadow on the other side of him said, “I think my neck’s broken.”

“Who’s that?”

“That daft bastard,” said the shadow, nastily.

“Oh. Sorry, Sconner.”

Sconner stood up, his whole body now outlined in magical aura. He was trembling with rage as he raised his hands.

“I’ll show that wretched throwback to respect his evolutionary superiors—” he snarled.

“Get him, lads!”

And Sconner was borne to the flagstones again under the weight of all five wizards.

“Sorry, but—”

“—you know that if you use—”

“—magic near the Library, with all the magic that’s in there—”

“—get one thing wrong and it’s a critical Mass and then—”

“BANG! Goodnight, world!”

Sconner growled. The wizards sitting on him decided that getting up was not the wisest thing they could do at this point.

Eventually he said, “Right. You’re right. Thank you. It was wrong of me to lose my temper like that. Clouded my judgment. Essential to be dispassionate. You’re absolutely right. Thank you. Get off.”

They risked it. Sconner stood up.

“That monkey,” he said, “has eaten its last banana. Fetch—”

“Er. Ape, Sconner,” said the smallest wizard, unable to stop himself. “It’s an ape, you see. Not a monkey…”

He wilted under the stare.

“Who cares? Ape, monkey, what’s the difference?” said Sconner. “What’s the difference, Mr. Zoologist?”

“I don’t know, Sconner,” said the wizard meekly. “I think it’s a class thing.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, Sconner.”

“You ghastly little man,” said Sconner.

He turned and added, in a voice as level as a sawblade: “I am perfectly controlled. My mind is as cool as a bald mammoth. My intellect is absolutely in charge. Which one of you sat on my head? No, I must not get angry. I am not angry. I am thinking positively. My faculties are fully engaged—do any of you wish to argue?”

“No, Sconner,” they chorused.

“Then get me a dozen barrels of oil and all the kindling you can find! That ape’s gonna fry!”

From high in the Library roof, home of owls and bats and other things, there was a clink of chain and the sound of glass being broken as respectfully as possible.

“They don’t look very worried,” said Nijel, slightly affronted.

“How can I put this?” said Rincewind. “When they come to write the list of Great Battle Cries of the World, ‘Erm, excuse me’ won’t be one of them.”

He stepped to one side. “I’m not with him,” he said earnestly to a grinning guard. “I just met him, somewhere. In a pit.” He gave a little laugh. “This sort of thing happens to me all the time,” he said.

The guards stared through him.

“Erm,” he said.

“Okay,” he said.

He sidled back to Nijel.

“Are you any good with that sword?”

Without taking his eyes off the guards, Nijel fumbled in his pack and handed Rincewind the book.

“I’ve read the whole of chapter three,” he said. “It’s got illustrations.”

Rincewind turned over the crumpled pages. The book had been used so hard you could have shuffled it, but what was probably once the front cover showed a rather poor woodcut of a muscular man. He had arms like two bags full of footballs, and he was standing knee-deep in languorous women and slaughtered victims with a smug expression on his face.

About him was the legend: Inne Juste 7 Dayes I wille make You a Barbearian Hero! Below it, in a slightly smaller type, was the name: Cohen the Barbarean. Rincewind rather doubted it. He had met Cohen and, while he could read after a fashion, the old boy had never really mastered the pen and still signed his name with an “X,” which he usually spelled wrong. On the other hand, he gravitated rapidly to anything with money in it.

Rincewind looked again at the illustration, and then at Nijel.

“Seven days?”

“Well, I’m a slow reader.”

“Ah,” said Rincewind.

“And I didn’t bother with chapter six, because I promised my mother I’d stick with just the looting and pillaging, until I find the right girl.”

“And this book teaches you how to be a hero?”

“Oh, yes. It’s very good.” Nijel gave him a worried glance. “That’s all right, isn’t it? It cost a lot of money.”

“Well, er. I suppose you’d better get on with it, then.”

Nijel squared his, for want of a better word, shoulders, and waved his sword again.

“You four had better just jolly well watch out,” he said, “or…hold on a moment.” He took the book from Rincewind and riffled through the pages until he found what he was looking for, and continued, “Yes, or ‘the chill winds of fate will blow through your bleached skeletons/the legions of Hell will drown your living soul in acid.’ There. How d’you like them…excuse me a moment…apples?”

There was a metallic chord as four men drew their swords in perfect harmony.

Nijel’s sword became a blur. It made a complicated figure eight in the air in front of him, spun over his arm, flicked from hand to hand behind his back, seemed to orbit his chest twice, and leapt like a salmon.

One or two of the harem ladies broke into spontaneous applause. Even the guards looked impressed. “That’s a Triple Orcthrust with Extra Flip,” said Nijel proudly. “I broke a lot of mirrors learning that. Look, they’re stopping.”

“They’ve never seen anything like it, I imagine,” said Rincewind weakly, judging the distance to the doorway.

“I should think not.”

“Especially the last bit, where it stuck in the ceiling.”

Nijel looked upwards.

“Funny,” he said, “it always did that at home, too. I wonder what I’m doing wrong.”

“Search me.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry,” said Nijel, as the guards seemed to realize that the entertainment was over and closed in for the kill.

“Don’t blame yourself—” said Rincewind, as Nijel reached up and tried unsuccessfully to free the blade.

“Thank you.”

“—I’ll do it for you.”

Rincewind considered his next step. In fact, he considered several steps. But the door was too far away and anyway, by the sound of it, things were not a lot healthier out there.

There was only one thing for it. He’d have to try magic.

He raised his hand and two of the men fell over. He raised his other hand and the other two fell over.

Just as he was beginning to wonder about this, Conina stepped daintily over the prone bodies, idly rubbing the sides of her hands.

“I thought you’d never turn up,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”

As has already been indicated, the Luggage seldom shows any sign of emotion, or at least any emotion less extreme than blind rage and hatred, and therefore it is hard to gauge its feelings when it woke up, a few miles outside Al Khali, on its lid in a dried-up wadi with its legs in the air.

Even a few minutes after dawn the air was like the breath of a furnace. After a certain amount of rocking the Luggage managed to get most of its feet pointing the right way, and stood doing a complicated slow-motion jig to keep as few of them on the burning sand as possible.

It wasn’t lost. It always knew exactly where it was. It was always here.

It was just that everywhere else seemed to have been temporarily mislaid.

After some deliberation the Luggage turned and walked very slowly, into a boulder.

It backed away and sat down, rather puzzled. It felt as though it had been stuffed with hot feathers, and it was dimly aware of the benefits of shade and a nice cool drink.

After a few false starts it walked to the top of a nearby sand dune, which gave it an unrivalled view of hundreds of other dunes.

Deep in its heartwood the Luggage was troubled. It had been spurned. It had been told to go away. It had been rejected. It had also drunk enough orakh to poison a small country.

If there is one thing a travel accessory needs more than anything else, it is someone to belong to. The Luggage set off unsteadily across the scorching sand, full of hope.

“I don’t think we’ve got time for introductions,” said Rincewind, as a distant part of the palace collapsed with a thump that vibrated the floor. “It’s time we were—”

He realized he was talking to himself.

Nijel let go of the sword.

Conina stepped forward.

“Oh, no,” said Rincewind, but it was far too late. The world had suddenly separated into two parts—the bit which contained Nijel and Conina, and the bit which contained everything else. The air between them crackled. Probably, in their half, a distant orchestra was playing, bluebirds were tweeting, little pink clouds were barrelling through the sky, and all the other things that happen at times like this. When that sort of thing is going on, mere collapsing palaces in the next world don’t stand a chance.

“Look, perhaps we can just get the introductions over with,” said Rincewind desperately. “Nijel—”

“—the Destroyer—” said Nijel dreamily.

“All right, Nijel the Destroyer,” said Rincewind, and added, “Son of Harebut the—”

“Mighty,” said Nijel. Rincewind gaped a bit, and then shrugged.

“Well, whoever,” he conceded. “Anyway, this is Conina. Which is rather a coincidence, because you’ll be interested to know that her father was mmph.”

Conina, without turning her gaze, had extended a hand and held Rincewind’s face in a gentle grip which, with only a slight increase in finger pressure, could have turned his head into a bowling ball.

“Although I could be mistaken,” he added, when she took her hand away. “Who knows? Who cares? What does it matter?”

They didn’t take any notice.

“I’ll just go and see if I can find the hat, shall I?” he said.

“Good idea,” murmured Conina.

“I expect I shall get murdered, but I don’t mind,” said Rincewind.

“Jolly good,” said Nijel.

“I don’t expect anyone will even notice I’m gone,” said Rincewind.

“Fine, fine,” said Conina.

“I shall be chopped into small pieces, I expect,” said Rincewind, walking toward the door at the speed of a dying snail.

Conina blinked.

“What hat?” she said, and then, “Oh, that hat.”

“I suppose there’s no possible chance that you two might be of some assistance?” Rincewind ventured.

Somewhere inside Conina and Nijel’s private world the bluebirds went to roost, the little pink clouds drifted away and the orchestra packed up and sneaked off to do a private gig at a nightclub somewhere. A bit of reality reasserted itself.

Conina dragged her admiring gaze away from Nijel’s rapt face and turned it onto Rincewind, where it grew slightly cooler.

She sidled across the floor and grabbed the wizard by the arm.

“Look,” she said, “you won’t tell him who I really am, will you? Only boys get funny ideas and—well, anyway, if you do I will personally break all your—”

“I’ll be far too busy,” said Rincewind, “what with you helping me get the hat and everything. Not that I can imagine what you see in him,” he added, haughtily.

“He’s nice. I don’t seem to meet many nice people.”

“Yes, well—”

“He’s looking at us!”

“So what? You’re not frightened of him, are you?”

“Suppose he talks to me!”

Rincewind looked blank. Not for the first time in his life, he felt that there were whole areas of human experience that had passed him by, if areas could pass by people. Maybe he had passed them by. He shrugged.

“Why did you let them take you off to the harem without a fight?” he said.

“I’ve always wanted to know what went on in one.”

There was a pause. “Well?” said Rincewind.

“Well, we all sat round, and then after a bit the Seriph came in, and then he asked me over and said that since I was new it would be my turn, and then, you’ll never guess what he wanted me to do. The girls said it’s the only thing he’s interested in.”

“Er.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine, fine,” Rincewind muttered.

“Your face has gone all shiny.”

“No, I’m fine, fine.”

“He asked me to tell him a story.”

“What about?” said Rincewind suspiciously.

“The other girls said he prefers something with rabbits in it.”

“Ah. Rabbits.”

“Small fluffy white ones. But the only stories I know are the ones father taught me when I was little, and I don’t think they’re really suitable.”

“Not many rabbits?”

“Lots of arms and legs being chopped off,” said Conina, and sighed. “That’s why you mustn’t tell him about me you see? I’m just not cut out for a normal life.”

“Telling stories in a harem isn’t bloody normal,” said Rincewind. “It’ll never catch on.”

“He’s looking at us again!” Conina grabbed Rincewind’s arm.

He shook her off. “Oh, good grief,” he said, and hurried across the room to Nijel, who grabbed his other arm.

“You haven’t been telling her about me, have you?” he demanded. “I’ll never live it down if you’ve told her that I’m only just learning how—”

“Nonono. She just wants you to help us. It’s a sort of quest.”

Nijel’s eyes gleamed.

“You mean a geas?” he said.

“Pardon?”

“It’s in the book. To be a proper hero it says you’ve got to labor under a geas.”

Rincewind’s forehead wrinkled. “Is it a sort of bird?”

“I think it’s more a sort of obligation, or something,” said Nijel, but without much certainty.

“Sounds more like a kind of bird to me,” said Rincewind, “I’m sure I read it in a bestiary once. Large. Couldn’t fly. Big pink legs, it had.” His face went blank as his ears digested what they had just heard his lips say.

Five seconds later they were out of the room, leaving behind four prone guards and the harem ladies themselves, who settled down for a bit of story-telling.

The desert rimwards of Al Khali is bisected by the river Tsort, famed in myth and lies, which insinuates its way through the brown landscapes like a long damp descriptive passage punctuated with sandbanks. And every sandbank is covered with sunbaked logs, and most of the logs are the kind of logs that have teeth, and most of the logs opened one lazy eye at the distant sounds of splashing from upstream, and suddenly most of the logs had legs. A dozen scaly bodies slipped into the turbid waters, which rolled over them again. The dark waters were unruffled, except for a few inconsequential V-shaped ripples.

The Luggage paddled gently down the stream. The water was making it feel a little better. It spun gently in the weak current, the focus of several mysterious little swirls that sped across the surface of the water.

The ripples converged.

The Luggage jerked. Its lid flew open. It shot under the surface with a brief, despairing creak.

The chocolate-colored waters of the Tsort rolled back again. They were getting good at it.

And the tower of sourcery loomed over Al Khali like a vast and beautiful fungus, the kind that appear in books with little skull-and-crossbones symbols beside them.

The Seriph’s guard had fought back, but there were now quite a lot of bewildered frogs and newts around the base of the tower, and they were the fortunate ones. They still had arms and legs, of a sort, and most of their essential organs were still on the inside. The city was under the rule of sourcery…martial lore.

Some of the buildings nearest the base of the tower were already turning into the bright white marble that the wizards obviously preferred.

The trio stared out through a hole in the palace walls.

“Very impressive,” said Conina critically. “Your wizards are more powerful than I thought.”

“Not my wizards,” said Rincewind. “I don’t know whose wizards they are. I don’t like it. All the wizards I knew couldn’t stick one brick on another.”

“I don’t like the idea of wizards ruling everybody,” said Nijel. “Of course, as a hero I am philosophically against the whole idea of wizardry in any case. The time will come when,” his eyes glazed slightly, as if he was trying to remember something he’d seen somewhere, “the time will come when all wizardry has gone from the face of the world and the sons of, of—anyway, we can all be a bit more practical about things,” he added lamely.

“Read it in a book, did you?” said Rincewind sourly. “Any geas in it?”

“He’s got a point,” said Conina. “I’ve nothing against wizards, but it’s not as if they do much good. They’re just a bit of decoration, really. Up to now.”

Rincewind pulled off his hat. It was battered, stained and covered with rock dust, bits of it had been sheared off, the point was dented and the star was shedding sequins like pollen, but the word ‘Wizzard’ was still just readable under the grime.

“See this?” he demanded, red in the face. “Do you see it? Do you? What does it tell you?”

“That you can’t spell?” said Nijel.

“What? No! It says I’m a wizard, that’s what! Twenty years behind the staff, and proud of it! I’ve done my time, I have! I’ve pas—I’ve sat dozens of exams! If all the spells I’ve read were piled on top of one another, they’d…it’d…you’d have a lot of spells!”

“Yes, but—” Conina began.

“Yes?”

“You’re not actually very good at them, are you?”

Rincewind glared at her. He tried to think of what to say next, and a small receptor area opened in his mind at the same time as an inspiration particle, its path bent and skewed by a trillion random events, screamed down through the atmosphere and burst silently just at the right spot.

“Talent just defines what you do,” he said. “It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.”

He thought a bit more and added, “That’s what makes sourcerers so powerful. The important thing is to know what you really are.”

There was a pause full of philosophy.

“Rincewind?” said Conina, kindly.

“Hmm?” said Rincewind, who was still wondering how the words got into his head.

“You really are an idiot. Do you know that?”

“You will all stand very still.”

Abrim the vizier stepped out of a ruined archway. He was wearing the Archchancellor’s hat.

The desert fried under the flame of the sun. Nothing moved except the shimmering air, hot as a stolen volcano, dry as a skull.

A basilisk lay panting in the baking shade of a rock, dribbling corrosive yellow slime. For the last five minutes its ears had been detecting the faint thump of hundreds of little legs moving unsteadily over the dunes, which seemed to indicate that dinner was on the way.

It blinked its legendary eyes and uncoiled twenty feet of hungry body, winding out and onto the sand like fluid death.

The Luggage staggered to a halt and raised its lid threateningly. The basilisk hissed, but a little uncertainly, because it had never seen a walking box before, and certainly never one with lots of alligator teeth stuck in its lid. There were also scraps of leathery hide adhering to it, as though it had been involved in a fight in a handbag factory, and in a way that the basilisk wouldn’t have been able to describe even if it could talk, it appeared to be glaring.

Right, the reptile thought, if that’s the way you want to play it.

It turned on the Luggage a stare like a diamond drill, a stare that nipped in via the staree’s eyeballs and flayed the brain from the inside, a stare that tore the frail net curtains on the windows of the soul, a stare that—

The basilisk realized something was very wrong. An entirely new and unwelcome sensation started to arise just behind its saucer-shaped eyes. It started small, like the little itch in those few square inches of back that no amount of writhing will allow you to scratch, and grew until it became a second, red-hot, internal sun.

The basilisk was feeling a terrible, overpowering and irresistible urge to blink…

It did something incredibly unwise.

It blinked.

“He’s talking through his hat,” said Rincewind.

“Eh?” said Nijel, who was beginning to realize that the world of the barbarian hero wasn’t the clean, simple place he had imagined in the days when the most exciting thing he had ever done was stack parsnips.

“The hat’s talking through him, you mean,” said Conina, and she backed away too, as one tends to do in the presence of horror.

“Eh?”

“I will not harm you. You have been of some service,” said Abrim, stepping forward with his hands out. “But you are right. He thought he could gain power through wearing me. Of course, it is the other way around. An astonishingly devious and clever mind.”

“So you tried his head on for size?” said Rincewind. He shuddered. He’d worn the hat. Obviously he didn’t have the right kind of mind. Abrim did have the right kind of mind, and now his eyes were gray and colorless, his skin was pale and he walked as though his body was hanging down from his head.

Nijel had pulled out his book and was riffling feverishly through the pages.

“What on earth are you doing?” said Conina, not taking her eyes off the ghastly figure.

“I’m looking up the Index of Wandering Monsters,” said Nijel. “Do you think it’s an Undead? They’re awfully difficult to kill, you need garlic and—”

“You won’t find this in there,” said Rincewind slowly. “It’s—it’s a vampire hat.”

“Of course, it might be a Zombie,” said Nijel, running his finger down a page. “It says here you need black pepper and sea salt, but—”

“You’re supposed to fight the bloody things, not eat them,” said Conina.

“This is a mind I can use,” said the hat. “Now I can fight back. I shall rally wizardry. There is room for only one magic in this world, and I embody it. Sourcery beware!”

“Oh, no,” said Rincewind under his breath.

“Wizardry has learned a lot in the last twenty centuries. This upstart can be beaten. You three will follow me.”

It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t even an order. It was a sort of forecast. The voice of the hat went straight to the hindbrain without bothering to deal with the consciousness, and Rincewind’s legs started to move of their own accord.

The other two also jerked forward, walking with the awkward doll-like jerking that suggested that they, too, were on invisible strings.

“Why the oh, no?” said Conina, “I mean, ‘Oh, no’ on general principles I can understand, but was there any particular reason?”

“If we get a chance we must run,” said Rincewind.

“Did you have anywhere in mind?”

“It probably won’t matter. We’re doomed anyway.”

“Why?” said Nijel.

“Well,” said Rincewind, “have you ever heard of the Mage Wars?”

There were a lot of things on the Disc that owed their origin to the Mage Wars. Sapient pearwood was one of them.

The original tree was probably perfectly normal and spent its days drinking groundwater and eating sunshine in a state of blessed unawareness and then the magic wars broke around it and pitchforked its genes into a state of acute perspicacity.

It also left it ingrained, as it were, with a bad temper. But sapient pearwood got off lightly.

Once, when the level of background magic on the Disc was young and high and found every opportunity to burst on the world, wizards were all as powerful as sourcerers and built their towers on every hilltop. And if there was one thing a really powerful wizard can’t stand, it is another wizard. His instinctive approach to diplomacy is to hex ’em till they glow, then curse them in the dark.

That could only mean one thing. All right, two things. Three things.

All-out. Thaumaturgical. War.

And there were of course no alliances, no sides, no deals, no mercy, no cease. The skies twisted, the seas boiled. The scream and whizz of fireballs turned the night into day, but that was all right because the ensuing clouds of black smoke turned the day into night. The landscape rose and fell like a honeymoon duvet, and the very fabric of space itself was tied in multidimensional knots and bashed on a flat stone down by the river of Time. For example, a popular spell at the time was Pelepel’s Temporal Compressor, which on one occasion resulted in a race of giant reptiles being created, evolving, spreading, flourishing and then being destroyed in the space of about five minutes, leaving only its bones in the earth to mislead forthcoming generations completely. Trees swam, fishes walked, mountains strolled down to the shops for a packet of cigarettes, and the mutability of existence was such that the first thing any cautious person would do when they woke up in the mornings was count their arms and legs.

That was, in fact, the problem. All the wizards were pretty evenly matched and in any case lived in high towers well protected with spells, which meant that most magical weapons rebounded and landed on the common people who were trying to scratch an honest living from what was, temporarily, the soil, and lead ordinary, decent (but rather short) lives.

But still the fighting raged, battering the very structure of the universe of order, weakening the walls of reality and threatening to topple the whole rickety edifice of time and space into the darkness of the Dungeon Dimensions…

One story said that the gods stepped in, but the gods don’t usually take a hand in human affairs unless it amuses them. Another one—and this was the one that the wizards themselves told, and wrote down in their books—was that the wizards themselves got together and settled their differences amicably for the good of mankind. And this was generally accepted as the true account, despite being as internally likely as a lead lifebelt.

The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find…

“What happened, then?” said Conina.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Rincewind, mournfully. “It’s going to start all over again. I can feel it. I’ve got this instinct. There’s too much magic flowing into the world. There’s going to be a horrible war. It’s all going to happen. The Disc is too old to take it this time. Everything’s been worn too thin. Doom, darkness and destruction bear down on us. The Apocralypse is nigh.”

“Death walks abroad,” added Nijel helpfully.

“What?” snapped Rincewind, angry at being interrupted.

“I said, Death walks abroad,” said Nijel.

“Abroad I don’t mind,” said Rincewind. “They’re all foreigners. It’s Death walking around here I’m not looking forward to.”

“It’s only a metaphor,” said Conina.

“That’s all you know. I’ve met him.”

“What did he look like?” said Nijel.

“Put it like this—”

“Yes?”

“He didn’t need a hairdresser.”

Now the sun was a blowlamp nailed to the sky, and the only difference between the sand and red-hot ash was the color.

The Luggage plodded erratically across the burning dunes. There were a few traces of yellow slime rapidly drying on its lid.

The lonely little oblong was watched, from atop of a stone pinnacle the shape and temperature of a firebrick, by a chimera.^* The chimera was an extremely rare species, and this particular one wasn’t about to do anything to help matters.

It judged its moment carefully, kicked away with its talons, folded its leathery wings and plummeted down toward its victim.

The chimera’s technique was to swoop low over the prey, lightly boiling it with its fiery breath, and then turn and rend its dinner with its teeth. It managed the fire part but then, at the point where experience told the creature it should be facing a stricken and terrified victim, found itself on the ground in the path of a scorched and furious Luggage.

The only thing incandescent about the Luggage was its rage. It had spent several hours with a headache, during which it had seemed the whole world had tried to attack it. It had had enough.

When it had stamped the unfortunate chimera into a greasy puddle on the sand it paused for a moment, apparently considering its future. It was becoming clear that not belonging to anyone was a lot harder than it had thought. It had vague, comforting recollections of service and a wardrobe to call its own.

It turned around very slowly, pausing frequently to open its lid. It might have been sniffing the air, if it had a nose. At last it made up its mind, if it had a mind.

The hat and its wearer also strode purposefully across the rubble that had been the legendary Rhoxie to the foot of the tower of sourcery, their unwilling entourage straggling along behind them.

There were doors at the foot of the tower. Unlike those of Unseen University, which were usually propped wide open, they were tightly shut. They seemed to glow.

“You three are privileged to be here,” said the hat through Abrim’s slack mouth. “This is the moment when wizardry stops running,” he glanced witheringly at Rincewind, “and starts fighting back. You will remember it for the rest of your lives.”

“What, until lunchtime?” said Rincewind weakly.

“Watch closely,” said Abrim. He extended his hands.

“If we get a chance,” whispered Rincewind to Nijel, “we run, right?”

“Where to?”

“From,” said Rincewind, “the important word is from.”

“I don’t trust this man,” said Nijel. “I try not to judge from first impressions, but I definitely think he’s up to no good.”

“He had you thrown in a snake pit!”

“Perhaps I should have taken the hint.”

The vizier started to mutter. Even Rincewind, whose few talents included a gift for languages, didn’t recognize it, but it sounded like the kind of language designed specifically for muttering, the words curling out like scythes at ankle height, dark and red and merciless. They made complicated swirls in the air, and then drifted gently toward the doors of the tower.

Where they touched the white marble it turned black and crumbled.

As the remains drifted to the ground a wizard stepped through and looked Abrim up and down.

Rincewind was used to the dressy ways of wizards, but this one was really impressive, his robe so padded and crenellated and buttressed in fantastic folds and creases that it had probably been designed by an architect. The matching hat looked like a wedding cake that had collided intimately with a Christmas tree.

The actual face, peering through the small gap between the baroque collar and the filigreed fringe of the brim, was a bit of a disappointment. At some time in the past it had thought its appearance would be improved by a thin, scruffy mustache. It had been wrong.

“That was our bloody door!” it said. “You’re really going to regret this!”

Abrim folded his arms.

This seemed to infuriate the other wizard. He flung up his arms, untangled his hands from the lace on his sleeves, and sent a flare screaming across the gap.

It struck Abrim in the chest and rebounded in a gout of incandescence, but when the blue after-images allowed Rincewind to see he saw Abrim, unharmed.

His opponent frantically patted out the last of the little fires in his own clothing and looked up with murder in his eyes.

“You don’t seem to understand,” he rasped. “It’s sourcery you’re dealing with now. You can’t fight sourcery.”

“I can use sourcery,” said Abrim.

The wizard snarled and lofted a fireball, which burst harmlessly inches from Abrim’s dreadful grin.

A look of acute puzzlement passed across the other one’s face. He tried again, sending lines of blue-hot magic lancing straight from infinity toward Abrim’s heart. Abrim waved them away.

“Your choice is simple,” he said. “You can join me, or you can die.”

It was at this point that Rincewind became aware of a regular scraping sound close to his ear. It had an unpleasant metallic ring.

He half-turned, and felt the familiar and very uncomfortable prickly feeling of Time slowing down around him.

Death paused in the act of running a whetstone along the edge of his scythe and gave him a nod of acknowledgment, as between one professional and another.

He put a bony digit to his lips, or rather, to the place where his lips would have been if he’d had lips.

All wizards can see Death, but they don’t necessarily want to.

There was a popping in Rincewind’s ears and the specter vanished.

Abrim and the rival wizard were surrounded by a corona of randomized magic, and it was evidently having no effect on Abrim. Rincewind drifted back into the land of the living just in time to see the man reach out and grab the wizard by his tasteless collar.

“You cannot defeat me,” he said in the hat’s voice. “I have had two thousand years of harnessing power to my own ends. I can draw my power from your power. Yield to me or you won’t even have time to regret it.”

The wizard struggled and, unfortunately, let pride win over caution.

“Never!” he said.

“Die,” suggested Abrim.

Rincewind had seen many strange things in his life, most of them with extreme reluctance, but he had never seen anyone actually killed by magic.

Wizards didn’t kill ordinary people because a) they seldom noticed them and b) it wasn’t considered sporting and c) besides, who’d do all the cooking and growing food and things. And killing a brother wizard with magic was well-nigh impossible on account of the layers of protective spells that any cautious wizard maintained about his person at all times.^* The first thing a young wizard learns at Unseen University—apart from where his peg is, and which way to the lavatory—is that he must protect himself at all times.

Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn’t. Paranoids only think everyone is out to get them. Wizards know it.

The little wizard was wearing the psychic equivalent of three feet of tempered steel and it was being melted like butter under a blowlamp. It streamed away, vanished.

If there are words to describe what happened to the wizard next then they’re imprisoned inside a wild thesaurus in the Unseen University Library. Perhaps it’s best left to the imagination, except that anyone able to imagine the kind of shape that Rincewind saw writhing painfully for a few seconds before it mercifully vanished must be a candidate for the famous white canvas blazer with the optional long sleeves.

“So perish all enemies,” said Abrim.

He turned his face up to the heights of the tower.

“I challenge,” he said. “And those who will not face me must follow me, according to the Lore.”

There was a long, thick pause caused by a lot of people listening very hard. Eventually, from the top of the tower, a voice called out uncertainly, “Whereabouts in the Lore?”

“I embody the Lore.”

There was a distant whispering and then the same voice called out, “The Lore is dead. Sourcery is above the Lo—”

The sentence ended in a scream because Abrim raised his left hand and sent a thin beam of green light in the precise direction of the speaker.

It was at about this moment that Rincewind realized that he could move his limbs himself. The hat had temporarily lost interest in them. He glanced sideways at Conina. In instant, unspoken agreement they each grasped one of Nijel’s arms and turned and ran, and didn’t stop until they’d put several walls between them and the tower. Rincewind ran expecting something to hit him in the back of the neck. Possibly the world.

All three landed in the rubble and lay there panting.

“You needn’t have done that,” muttered Nijel. “I was just getting ready to really give him a seeing-to. How can I ever—”

There was an explosion behind them and shafts of multi-colored fire screamed overhead, striking sparks off the masonry. Then there was a sound like an enormous cork being pulled out of a small bottle, and a peal of laughter that, somehow, wasn’t very amusing. The ground shook.

“What’s going on?” said Conina.

“Magical war,” said Rincewind.

“Is that good?”

“No.”

“But surely you want wizardry to triumph?” said Nijel.

Rincewind shrugged, and ducked as something unseen and big whirred overhead making a noise like a partridge.

“I’ve never seen wizards fight,” said Nijel. He started to scramble up the rubble and screamed as Conina grabbed him by the leg.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” she said. “Rincewind?”

The wizard shook his head gloomily, and picked up a pebble. He tossed it up above the ruined wall, where it turned into a small blue teapot. It smashed when it hit the ground.

“The spells react with one another,” he said. “There’s no telling what they’ll do.”

“But we’re safe behind this wall?” said Conina.

Rincewind brightened a bit. “Are we?” he said.

“I was asking you.”

“Oh. No. I shouldn’t think so. It’s just ordinary stone. The right spell and…phooey.”

“Phooey?”

“Right.”

“Shall we run away again?”

“It’s worth a try.”

They made it to another upright wall a few seconds before a randomly spitting ball of yellow fire landed where they had been lying and turned the ground into something awful. The whole area around the tower was a tornado of sparkling air.

“We need a plan,” said Nijel.

“We could try running again,” said Rincewind.

“That doesn’t solve anything!”

“Solves most things,” said Rincewind.

“How far do we have to go to be safe?” said Conina.

Rincewind risked a look around the wall.

“Interesting philosophical question,” he said. “I’ve been a long way, and I’ve never been safe.”

Conina sighed and stared at a pile of rubble nearby. She stared at it again. There was something odd there, and she couldn’t quite put her finger on it.

“I could rush at them,” said Nijel, vaguely. He stared yearningly at Conina’s back.

“Wouldn’t work,” said Rincewind. “Nothing works against magic. Except stronger magic. And then the only thing that beats stronger magic is even stronger magic. And next thing you know…”

“Phooey?” suggested Nijel.

“It happened before,” said Rincewind. “Went on for thousands of years until not a—”

“Do you know what’s odd about that heap of stone?” said Conina.

Rincewind glanced at it. He screwed up his eyes.

“What, apart from the legs?” he said.

It took several minutes to dig the Seriph out. He was still clutching a wine bottle, which was almost empty, and blinked at them all in vague recognition.

“Powerful,” he said, and then after some effort added, “stuff, this vintage. Felt,” he continued, “as though the place fell on me.”

“It did,” said Rincewind.

“Ah. That would be it, then.” Creosote focused on Conina, after several attempts, and rocked backwards. “My word,” he said, “the young lady again. Very impressive.”

“I say—” Nijel began.

“Your hair,” said the Seriph, rocking slowly forward again, “is like, is like a flock of goats that graze upon the side of Mount Gebra.”

“Look here—”

“Your breasts are like, like,” the Seriph swayed sideways a little, and gave a brief, sorrowful glance at the empty bottle, “are like the jewelled melons in the fabled gardens of dawn.”

Conina’s eyes widened. “They are?” she said.

“No,” said the Seriph, “doubt about it. I know jewelled melons when I see them. As the white does in the meadows of the water margin are your thighs, which—”

“Erm, excuse me—” said Nijel, clearing his throat with malice aforethought.

Creosote swayed in his direction.

“Hmm?” he said.

“Where I come from,” said Nijel stonily, “we don’t talk to ladies like that.”

Conina sighed as Nijel shuffled protectively in front of her. It was, she reflected, absolutely true.

“In fact,” he went on, sticking out his jaw as far as possible, which still made it appear like a dimple, “I’ve a jolly good mind—”

“Open to debate,” said Rincewind, stepping forward. “Er, sir, sire, we need to get out. I suppose you wouldn’t know the way?”

“Thousands of rooms,” said the Seriph, “in here, you know. Not been out in years.” He hiccuped. “Decades. Ians. Never been out, in fact.” His face glazed over in the act of composition. “The bird of Time has but, um, a little way to walk and lo! the bird is on its feet.”

“It’s a geas,” muttered Rincewind.

Creosote swayed at him. “Abrim does all the ruling, you see. Terrible hard work.”

“He’s not,” said Rincewind, “making a very good job of it just at present.”

“And we’d sort of like to get away,” said Conina, who was still turning over the phrase about the goats.

“And I’ve got this geas,” said Nijel, glaring at Rincewind.

Creosote patted him on the arm.

“That’s nice,” he said. “Everyone should have a pet.

“So if you happen to know if you own any stables or anything…” prompted Rincewind.

“Hundreds,” said Creosote. “I own some of the finest, most…finest horses in the world.” His brow wrinkled. “So they tell me.”

“But you wouldn’t happen to know where they are?”

“Not as such,” the Seriph admitted. A random spray of magic turned the nearby wall into arsenic meringue.

“I think we might have been better off in the snake pit,” said Rincewind, turning away.

Creosote took another sorrowful glance at his empty wine bottle.

“I know where there’s a magic carpet,” he said.

“No,” said Rincewind, raising his hands protectively. “Absolutely not. Don’t even—”

“It belonged to my grandfather—”

“A real magic carpet?” said Nijel.

“Listen,” said Rincewind urgently. “I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.”

“Oh, quite,” the Seriph burped gently, “genuine. Very pretty pattern.” He squinted at the bottle again, and sighed. “It was a lovely blue color,” he added.

“And you wouldn’t happen to know where it is?” said Conina slowly, in the manner of one creeping up very carefully to a wild animal that might take fright at any moment.

“In the treasury. I know the way there. I’m extremely rich, you know. Or so they tell me.” He lowered his voice and tried to wink at Conina, eventually managing it with both eyes. “We could sit on it,” he said, breaking into a sweat. “And you could tell me a story…”

Rincewind tried to scream through gritted teeth.

His ankles were already beginning to sweat.

“I’m not going to ride on a magic carpet!” he hissed. “I’m afraid of grounds!”

“You mean heights,” said Conina. “And stop being silly.”

“I know what I mean! It’s the grounds that kill you!”

The battle of Al Khali was a hammer-headed cloud, in whose roiling depths weird shapes could be heard and strange sounds were seen. Occasional misses seared across the city. Where they landed things were…different.

For example, a large part of the soak had turned into an impenetrable forest of giant yellow mushrooms. No one knew what effect this had on its inhabitants, although possibly they hadn’t noticed.

The temple of Offler the Crocodile God, patron deity of the city, was now a rather ugly sugary thing constructed in five dimensions. But this was no problem because it was being eaten by a herd of giant ants.

On the other hand, not many people were left to appreciate this statement against uncontrolled civic alteration, because most of them were running for their lives. They fled across the fertile fields in a steady stream. Some had taken to boats, but this method of escape had ceased when most of the harbor area turned into a swamp in which, for no obvious reason, a couple of small pink elephants were building a nest.

Down below the panic on the roads the Luggage paddled slowly up one of the reed-lined drainage ditches. A little way ahead of it a moving wave of small alligators, rats and snapping turtles was pouring out of the water and scrambling frantically up the bank, propelled by some vague but absolutely accurate animal instinct.

The Luggage’s lid was set in an expression of grim determination. It didn’t want much out of the world, except for the total extinction of every other lifeform, but what it needed more than anything else now was its owner.

It was easy to see that the room was a treasury by its incredible emptiness. Doors hung off hooks. Barred alcoves had been smashed in. Lots of smashed chests lay around, and this gave Rincewind a pang of guilt and he wondered, for about two seconds, where the Luggage had got to.

There was a respectful silence, as there always is when large sums of money have just passed away. Nijel wandered off and prodded some of the chests in a forlorn search for secret drawers, as per the instructions in Chapter Eleven.

Conina reached down and picked up a small copper coin.

“How horrible,” said Rincewind eventually. “A treasury with no treasure in it.”

The seriph stood and beamed. “Not to worry,” he said.

“But all your money has been stolen!” said Conina.

“The servants, I expect,” said Creosote. “Very disloyal of them.”

Rincewind gave him an odd look. “Doesn’t it worry you?”

“Not much. I never really spent anything. I’ve often wondered what being poor was like.”

“You’re going to get a huge opportunity to find out.”

“Will I need training?”

“It comes naturally,” said Rincewind. “You pick it up as you go along.” There was a distant explosion and part of the ceiling turned to jelly.

“Erm, excuse me,” said Nijel, “this carpet…”

“Yes,” said Conina, “the carpet.”

Creosote gave them a benevolent, slightly tipsy smile.

“Ah, yes. The carpet. Push the nose of the statue behind you, peach-buttocked jewel of the desert dawn.”

Conina, blushing, performed this act of minor sacrilege on a large green statue of Offler the Crocodile God.

Nothing happened. Secret compartments assiduously failed to open.

“Um. Try the left hand.”

She gave it an experimental twist. Creosote scratched his head.

“Maybe it was the right hand…”

“I should try and remember, if I were you,” said Conina sharply, when that didn’t work either. “There aren’t many bits left that I’d care to pull.”

“What’s that thing there?” said Rincewind.

“You’re really going to hear about it if it isn’t the tail,” said Conina, and gave it a kick.

There was a distant metallic groaning noise, like a saucepan in pain. The statue shuddered. It was followed by a few heavy clonks somewhere inside the wall, and Offler the Crocodile God grated ponderously aside. There was a tunnel behind him.

“My grandfather had this built for our more interesting treasure,” said Creosote. “He was very”—he groped for a word—“ingenious.”

“If you think I’m setting foot in there—” Rincewind began.

“Stand aside,” said Nijel, loftily. “I will go first.”

“There could be traps—” said Conina doubtfully. She shot the Seriph a glance.

“Oh, probably, O gazelle of Heaven,” he said. “I haven’t been in there since I was six. There were some slabs you shouldn’t tread on, I think.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Nijel, peering into the gloom of the tunnel. “I shouldn’t think there’s a booby trap that I couldn’t spot.”

“Had a lot of experience at this sort of thing, have you?” said Rincewind sourly.

“Well, I know Chapter Fourteen by heart. It had illustrations,” said Nijel, and ducked into the shadows.

They waited for several minutes in what would have been a horrified hush if it wasn’t for the muffled grunts and occasional thumping noises from the tunnel. Eventually Nijel’s voice echoed back down to them from a distance.

“There’s absolutely nothing,” he said. “I’ve tried everything. It’s as steady as a rock. Everything must have seized up, or something.”

Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.

“He doesn’t know the first thing about traps,” she said. “When I was five, my father made me walk all the way down a passage that he’d rigged up, just to teach me—”

“He got through, didn’t he?” said Rincewind.

There was a noise like a damp finger dragged across glass, but amplified a billion times, and the floor shook.

“Anyway, we haven’t got a lot of choice,” he added, and ducked into the tunnel. The others followed him. Many people who had gotten to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner’s canary^* and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained.

“This is fun,” said Creosote. “Me, robbing my own treasury. If I catch myself I can have myself flung into the snake pit.”

“But you could throw yourself on your mercy,” said Conina, running a paranoid eye over the dusty stonework.

“Oh, no. I think I would have to teach me a lesson, as an example to myself.”

There was a little click above them. A small slab slid aside and a rusty metal hook descended slowly and jerkily. Another bar creaked out of the wall and tapped Rincewind on the shoulder. As he swung around, the first hook hung a yellowing notice on his back and retracted into the roof.

“What’d it do? What’d it do?” screamed Rincewind, trying to read his own shoulderblades.

“It says, Kick Me,” said Conina.

A section of wall slid up beside the petrified wizard. A large boot on the end of a complicated series of metal joints gave a half-hearted wobble and then the whole thing snapped at the knee.

The three of them looked at it in silence. Then Conina said, “We’re dealing here with a warped brain, I can tell.”

Rincewind gingerly unhooked the sign and let it drop. Conina pushed past him and stalked along the passage with an air of angry caution, and when a metal hand extended itself on a spring and waggled in a friendly fashion she didn’t shake it but instead traced its moulting wiring to a couple of corroded electrodes in a big glass jar.

“Your grandad was a man with a sense of humor?” she said.

“Oh, yes. Always liked a chuckle,” said Creosote.

“Oh, good,” said Conina. She prodded gingerly at a flagstone which, to Rincewind, looked no different to any of its fellows. With a sad little springy noise a moulting feather duster wobbled out of the wall at armpit height.

“I think I would have quite liked to meet the old Seriph,” she said, through gritted teeth, “although not to shake him by the hand. You’d better give me a leg up here, wizard.”

“Pardon?”

Conina pointed irritably to a half-open stone doorway just ahead of them.

“I want to look up there,” she said. “You just put your hands together for me to stand on, right? How do you manage to be so useless?”

“Being useful always gets me into trouble,” muttered Rincewind, trying to ignore the warm flesh brushing against his nose.

He could hear her rooting around above the door.

“I thought so,” she said.

“What is it? Fiendishly sharp spears poised to drop?”

“No.”

“Spiked grill ready to skewer—?”

“It’s a bucket,” said Conina flatly, giving it a push.

“What, of scalding, poisonous—?”

“Whitewash. Just a lot of old, dried-up whitewash.” Conina jumped down.

“That’s grandfather for you,” said Creosote. “Never a dull moment.”

“Well, I’ve just about had enough,” Conina said firmly, and pointed to the far end of the tunnel. “Come on, you two.”

They were about three feet from the far end when Rincewind felt a movement in the air above him. Conina struck him in the small of the back, shoving him forward into the room beyond. He rolled when he hit the floor, and something nicked his foot at the same time as a loud thump deafened him.

The entire roof, a huge block of stone four feet thick, had dropped into the tunnel.

Rincewind crawled forward through the dust clouds and, with a trembling finger, traced the lettering on the side of the slab.

“Laugh This One Off, he said,

He sat back.

“That’s grandad,” said Creosote happily, “always a—”

He intercepted Conina’s gaze, which had the force of a lead pipe, and wisely shut up.

Nijel emerged from the clouds, coughing.

“I say, what happened?” he said. “Is everyone all right? It didn’t do that when I went through.”

Rincewind sought for a reply, and couldn’t find anything better than, “Didn’t it?”

Light filtered into the deep room from tiny barred windows up near the roof. There was no way out except by walking through the several hundred tons of stone that blocked the tunnel or, to put it in another way, which was the way Rincewind put it, they were undoubtedly trapped. He relaxed a bit.

At least there was no mistaking the magic carpet. It lay rolled up on a raised slab in the middle of the room. Next to it was a small, sleek oil lamp and—Rincewind craned to see—a small gold ring. He groaned. A faint octarine corona hung over all three items, indicating that they were magical.

When Conina unrolled the carpet a number of small objects tumbled onto the floor, including a brass herring, a wooden ear, a few large square sequins and a lead box with a preserved soap bubble in it.

“What on earth are they?” said Nijel.

“Well,” said Rincewind, “before they tried to eat that carpet, they were probably moths.”

“Gosh.”

“That’s what you people never understand,” said Rincewind, wearily. “You think magic is just something you can pick up and use, like a, a—”

“Parsnip?” said Nijel.

“Wine bottle?” said the Seriph.

“Something like that,” said Rincewind cautiously, but rallied somewhat and went on, “But the truth is, is—”

“Not like that?”

“More like a wine bottle?” said the Seriph hopefully.

“Magic uses people,” said Rincewind hurriedly. “It affects you as much as you affect it, sort of thing. You can’t mess around with magical things without it affecting you. I just thought I’d better warn you.”

“Like a wine bottle,” said Creosote, “that—”

“—drinks you back,” said Rincewind. “So you can put down that lamp and ring for a start, and for goodness’ sake don’t rub anything.”

“My grandfather built up the family fortunes with them,” said Creosote wistfully. “His wicked uncle locked him in a cave, you know. He had to set himself up with what came to hand. He had nothing in the whole world but a magic carpet, a magic lamp, a magic ring and a grotto full of assorted jewels.”

“Came up the hard way, did he?” said Rincewind.

Conina spread the carpet on the floor. It had a complex pattern of golden dragons on a blue background. They were extremely complicated dragons, with long beards, ears and wings, and they seemed to be frozen in motion, caught in transition from one state to another, suggesting that the loom which wove them had rather more dimensions than the usual three, but the worst thing about it was that if you looked at it long enough the pattern became blue dragons on a gold background, and a terrible feeling stole over you that if you kept on trying to see both types of dragon at once your brains would trickle out of your ears.

Rincewind tore his gaze away with some difficulty as another distant explosion rocked the building.

“How does it work?” he said.

Creosote shrugged. “I’ve never used it,” he said. “I suppose you just say ‘up’ and ‘down’ and things like that.”

“How about ‘fly through the wall’?” said Rincewind.

All three of them looked up at the high, dark and, above all, solid walls of the room.

“We could try sitting on it and saying ‘rise,’” Nijel volunteered. “And then, before we hit the roof, we could say, well, ‘stop.’” He considered this for a bit, and then added, “If that’s the word.”

“Or, ‘drop,’” said Rincewind, “or ‘descend,’ ‘dive,’ ‘fall,’ ‘sink.’ Or ‘plunge.’”

“‘Plummet,’” suggested Conina gloomily.

“Of course,” said Nijel, “with all this wild magic floating around, you could try using some of it.”

“Ah—” said Rincewind, and, “Well—”

“You’ve got ‘wizzard’ written on your hat,” said Creosote.

“Anyone can write things on their hat,” said Conina. “You don’t want to believe everything you read.”

“Now hold on a minute,” said Rincewind hotly.

They held on a minute.

They held on for a further seventeen seconds.

“Look, it’s a lot harder than you think,” he said.

“What did I tell you?” said Conina. “Come on, let’s dig the mortar out with our fingernails.”

Rincewind waved her into silence, removed his hat, pointedly blew the dust off the star, put the hat on again, adjusted the brim, rolled up his sleeves, flexed his fingers and panicked.

In default of anything better to do, he leaned against the stone.

It was vibrating. It wasn’t that it was being shaken; it felt like the throbbing was coming from inside the wall.

It was very much the same sort of trembling he had felt back at the University, just before the sourcerer arrived. The stone was definitely very unhappy about something.

He sidled along the wall and put his ear to the next stone, which was a smaller, wedge-shaped stone cut to fit an angle of the wall, not a big, distinguished stone, but a bantam stone, patiently doing its bit for the greater good of the wall as a whole. It was also shaking.

“Shh!” said Conina.

“I can’t hear anything,” said Nijel loudly. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say ‘don’t look now,’ would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn around aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash.

Anyway.

“That’s the point! What happened to the war?”

A little cascade of mortar poured down from the ceiling onto Rincewind’s hat.

“Something’s acting on the stones,” he said quietly. “They’re trying to break free.”

“We’re right underneath quite a lot of them,” observed Creosote.

There was a grinding noise above them and a shaft of daylight lanced down. To Rincewind’s surprise it wasn’t accompanied by sudden death from crushing. There was another silicon creak, and the hole grew. The stones were falling out, and they were falling up.

“I think,” he said, “that the carpet might be worth a try at this point.”

The wall beside him shook itself like a dog and drifted apart, its masonry giving Rincewind several severe blows as it soared away.

The four of them landed on the blue and gold carpet in a storm of flying rock.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Nijel, keeping up his reputation for acute observation.

“Hang on,” said Rincewind. “I’ll say—”

“You won’t,” snapped Conina, kneeling beside him. “I’ll say. I don’t trust you.”

“But you’ve—”

“Shut up,” said Conina. She patted the carpet.

“Carpet—rise,” she commanded.

There was a pause.

“Up.”

“Perhaps it doesn’t understand the language,” said Nijel.

“Lift. Levitate. Fly.”

“Or it could be, say, sensitive to one particular voice—”

“Shut. Up.”

“You tried up,” said Nijel. “Try ascend.”

“Or soar,” said Creosote. Several tons of flagstone swooped past an inch from his head.

“If it was going to answer to them it would have done so, wouldn’t it?” said Conina. The air around her was thick with dust as the flying stones ground together. She thumped the carpet.

“Take off, you blasted mat! Arrgh!”

A piece of cornice clipped her shoulder. She rubbed the bruise irritably, and turned to Rincewind, who was sitting with his knees under his chin and his hat pulled down over his head.

“Why doesn’t it work?” she said.

“You’re not saying the right words,” he said.

“It doesn’t understand the language?”

“Language hasn’t got anything to do with it. You’ve neglected something fundamental.”

“Well?”

“Well what?” sniffed Rincewind.

“Look, this isn’t the time to stand on your dignity!”

“You keep on trying, don’t you mind me.”

“Make it fly!”

Rincewind pulled his hat further over his ears.

“Please?” said Conina.

The hat rose a bit.

“We’d all be terribly bucked,” said Nijel.

“Hear, hear,” said Creosote.

The hat rose some more. “You’re quite sure?” said Rincewind.

“Yes!”

Rincewind cleared his throat.

“Down,” he commanded.

The carpet rose from the ground and hovered expectantly a few feet over the dust.

“How did—” Conina began, but Nijel interrupted her.

“Wizards are privy to arcane knowledge, that’s probably what it is,” he said. “Probably the carpet’s got a geas on it to do the opposite of anything that’s said. Can you make it go up further?”

“Yes, but I’m not going to,” said Rincewind. The carpet drifted slowly forward and, as happens so often at times like this, a rolling of masonry bounced right across the spot where it had lain.

A moment later they were out in the open air, the storm of stone behind them.

The palace was pulling itself to pieces, and the pieces were funnelling up into the air like a volcanic eruption in reverse. The sourcerous tower had completely disappeared, but the stones were dancing toward the spot where it had stood and…

“They’re building another tower!” said Nijel.

“Out of my palace, too,” said Creosote.

“The hat’s won,” said Rincewind. “That’s why it’s building its own tower. It’s a sort of reaction. Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those…what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?”

“Frogs.”

“Stones.”

“Unsuccessful gangsters.”

“Caddis flies is what I meant,” said Rincewind. “When a wizard set out to fight, the first thing he always did was build a tower.”

“It’s very big,” said Nijel.

Rincewind nodded glumly.

“Where are we going?” said Conina.

Rincewind shrugged.

“Away,” he said.

The outer palace wall drifted just below them. As they passed over it began to shake, and small bricks began to loop toward the storm of flying rock that buzzed around the new tower.

Eventually Conina said, “All right. How did you get the carpet to fly? Does it really do the opposite of what you command?”

“No. I just paid attention to certain fundamental details of laminar and spatial arrangements.”

“You’ve lost me there,” she admitted.

“You want it in non-wizard talk?”

“Yes.”

“You put it on the floor upside down,” said Rincewind.

Conina sat very still for a while. Then she said, “I must say this is very comfortable. It’s the first time I’ve ever flown on a carpet.”

“It’s the first time I’ve ever flown one,” said Rincewind vaguely.

“You do it very well,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You said you were frightened of heights.”

“Terrified.”

“You don’t show it.”

“I’m not thinking about it.”

Rincewind turned and looked at the tower behind them. It had grown quite a lot in the last minute, blossoming at the top into a complexity of turrets and battlements. A swarm of tiles was hovering over it, individual tiles swooping down and clinking into place like ceramic bees on a bombing run. It was impossibly high—the stones at the bottom would have been crushed if it wasn’t for the magic that crackled through them.

Well, that was just about it as far as organized wizardry was concerned. Two thousand years of peaceful magic had gone down the drain, the towers were going up again, and with all this new raw magic floating around something was going to get very seriously hurt. Probably the universe. Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn’t good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.

And, of course, it would be impossible to explain things to his companions. They didn’t seem to grasp ideas properly; more particularly, they didn’t seem able to get the hang of doom. They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

The whole point about the old University organization was that it kept a sort of peace between wizards who got along with one another about as easily as cats in a sack, and now the gloves were off anyone who tried to interfere was going to end up severely scratched. This wasn’t the old, gentle, rather silly magic that the Disc was used to; this was magic war, white-hot and searing.

Rincewind wasn’t very good at precognition; in fact he could barely see into the present. But he knew with weary certainty that at some point in the very near future, like thirty seconds or so, someone would say: “Surely there’s something we could do?”

The desert passed below them, lit by the low rays of the setting sun.

“There don’t seem to be many stars,” said Nijel. “Perhaps they’re scared to come out.”

Rincewind looked up. There was a silver haze high in the air.

“It’s raw magic settling out of the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s saturated.”

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twen—

“Surely there’s—” Conina began.

“There isn’t,” said Rincewind flatly, but with just the faintest twinge of satisfaction. “The wizards will fight each other until there’s one victor. There isn’t anything anyone else can do.”

“I could do with a drink,” said Creosote. “I suppose we couldn’t stop somewhere where I could buy an inn?”

“What with?” said Nijel. “You’re poor, remember?”

“Poor I don’t mind,” said the Seriph. “It’s sobriety that is giving me difficulties.”

Conina prodded Rincewind gently in the ribs.

“Are you steering this thing?” she said.

“No.”

“Then where is it going?”

Nijel peered downwards.

“By the look of it,” he said, “it’s going hubwards. Towards the Circle Sea.”

“Someone must be guiding it.”

Hallo, said a friendly voice in Rincewind’s head.

You’re not my conscience again, are you? thought Rincewind.

I’m feeling really bad.

Well, I’m sorry, Rincewind thought, but none of this is my fault. I’m just a victim of circuses. I don’t see why I should take the blame.

Yes, but you could do something about it.

Like what?

You could destroy the sourcerer. All this would collapse then.

I wouldn’t stand a chance.

Then at least you could die in the attempt. That might be preferable to letting magical war break out.

“Look, just shut up, will you?” said Rincewind.

“What?” said Conina.

“Um?” said Rincewind, vaguely. He looked down blankly at the blue and gold pattern underneath him, and added, “You’re flying this, aren’t you? Through me! That’s sneaky!”

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh. Sorry. Talking to myself.”

“I think,” said Conina, “that we’d better land.”

They glided down toward a crescent of beach where the desert reached the sea. In a normal light it would have been blinding white with a sand made up of billions of tiny shell fragments, but at this time of day it was blood-red and primordial. Ranks of driftwood, carved by the waves and bleached by the sun, were piled up on the tideline like the bones of ancient fish or the biggest floral art accessory counter in the universe. Nothing stirred, apart from the waves. There were a few rocks around, but they were firebrick hot and home to no mollusc or seaweed.

Even the sea looked arid. If any proto-amphibian emerged onto a beach like this, it would have given up there and then, gone back into the water and told all its relatives to forget the legs, it wasn’t worth it. The air felt as though it had been cooked in a sock.

Even so, Nijel insisted that they light a fire.

“It’s more friendly,” he said. “Besides, there could be monsters.”

Conina looked at the oily wavelets, rolling up the beach in what appeared to be a half-hearted attempt to get out of the sea.

“In that?” she said.

“You never can tell.”

Rincewind mooched along the waterline, distractedly picking up stones and throwing them in the sea. One or two were thrown back.

After a while Conina got a fire going, and the bone-dry, salt-saturated wood sent blue and green flames roaring up under a fountain of sparks. The wizard went and sat in the dancing shadows, his back against a pile of whitened wood, wrapped in a cloud of such impenetrable gloom that even Creosote stopped complaining of thirst and shut up.

Conina woke up after midnight. There was a crescent moon on the horizon and a thin, chilly mist covered the sand. Creosote was snoring on his back. Nijel, who was theoretically on guard, was sound asleep.

Conina lay perfectly still, every sense seeking out the thing that had awaken her.

Finally she heard it again. It was a tiny, diffident clinking noise, barely audible above the muted slurp of the sea.

She got up, or rather, she slid into the vertical as bonelessly as a jellyfish, and flicked Nijel’s sword out of his unresisting hand. Then she sidled through the mist without causing so much as an extra swirl.

The fire sank down further into its bed of ash. After a while Conina came back, and shook the other two awake.

“Warrizit?”

“I think you ought to see this,” she hissed. “I think it could be important.”

“I just shut my eyes for a second—” Nijel protested.

“Never mind about that. Come on.”

Creosote squinted around the impromptu campsite.

“Where’s the wizard fellow?”

“You’ll see. And don’t make a noise. It could be dangerous.”

They stumbled after her knee-deep in vapor, toward the sea.

Eventually Nijel said, “Why dangerous—”

“Shh! Did you hear it?”

Nijel listened.

“Like a sort of ringing noise?”

“Watch…”

Rincewind walked jerkily up the beach, carrying a large round rock in both hands. He walked past them without a word, his eyes staring straight ahead.

They followed him along the cold beach until he reached a bare area between the dunes, where he stopped and, still moving with all the grace of a clothes horse, dropped the rock. It made a clinking noise.

There was a wide circle of other stones. Very few of them had actually stayed on top of another one.

The three of them crouched down and watched him.

“Is he asleep?” said Creosote.

Conina nodded.

“What’s he trying to do?”

“I think he’s trying to build a tower.”

Rincewind lurched back into the ring of stones and, with great care, placed another rock on empty air. It fell down.

“He’s not very good at it, is he,” said Nijel.

“It is very sad,” said Creosote.

“Maybe we ought to wake him up,” said Conina. “Only I heard that if you wake up sleepwalkers their legs fall off, or something. What do you think?”

“Could be risky, with wizards,” said Nijel.

They tried to make themselves comfortable on the chilly sand.

“It’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?” said Creosote. “It’s not as if he’s really a proper wizard.”

Conina and Nijel tried to avoid one another’s gaze. Finally the boy coughed, and said, “I’m not exactly a barbarian hero, you know. You may have noticed.”

They watched the toiling figure of Rincewind for a while, and then Conina said, “If it comes to that, I think I lack a certain something when it comes to hairdressing.”

They both stared fixedly at the sleepwalker, busy with their own thoughts and red with mutual embarrassment.

Creosote cleared his throat.

“If it makes anyone feel better,” he said, “I sometimes perceive that my poetry leaves a lot to be desired.”

Rincewind carefully tried to balance a large rock on a small pebble. It fell off, but he appeared to be happy with the result.

“Speaking as a poet,” said Conina carefully, “what would you say about this situation?”

Creosote shifted uneasily. “Funny old thing, life,” he said.

“Pretty apt.”

Nijel lay back and looked up at the hazy stars. Then he sat bolt upright.

“Did you see that?” he demanded.

“What?”

“It was a sort of flash, a kind of—”

The hubward horizon exploded into a silent flower of color, which expanded rapidly through all the hues of the conventional spectrum before flashing into brilliant octarine. It etched itself on their eyeballs before fading away.

After a while there was a distant rumble.

“Some sort of magical weapon,” said Conina, blinking. A gust of warm wind picked up the mist and streamed it past them.

“Blow this,” said Nijel, getting to his feet. “I’m going to wake him up, even if it means we end up carrying him.”

He reached out for Rincewind’s shoulder just as something went past very high overhead, making a noise like a flock of geese on nitrous oxide. It disappeared into the desert behind them. Then there was a sound that would have set false teeth on edge, a flash of green light, and a thump.

“I’ll wake him up,” said Conina. “You get the carpet.”

She clambered over the ring of rocks and took the sleeping wizard gently by the arm, and this would have been a textbook way of waking a somnambulist if Rincewind hadn’t dropped the rock he was carrying on his foot.

He opened his eyes.

“Where am I?” he said.

“On the beach. You’ve been…er…dreaming.”

Rincewind blinked at the mist, the sky, the circle of stones, Conina, the circle of stones again, and finally back at the sky.

“What’s been happening?” he said.

“Some sort of magical fireworks.”

“Oh. It’s started, then.”

He lurched unsteadily out of the circle, in a way that suggested to Conina that perhaps he wasn’t quite awake yet, and staggered back toward the remains of the fire. He walked a few steps and then appeared to remember something.

He looked down at his foot, and said, “Ow.”

He’d almost reached the fire when the blast from the last spell reached them. It had been aimed at the tower in Al Khali, which was twenty miles away, and by now the wavefront was extremely diffuse. It was hardly affecting the nature of things as it surged over the dunes with a faint sucking noise; the fire burned red and green for a second, one of Nijel’s sandals turned into a small and irritated badger, and a pigeon flew out of the Seriph’s turban.

Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.

“What was that?” said Nijel. He kicked the badger, who was sniffing at his foot.

“Hmm?” said Rincewind.

“That!”

“Oh, that,” said Rincewind. “Just the backwash of a spell. They probably hit the tower in Al Khali.”

“It must have been pretty big to affect us here.”

“It probably was.”

“Hey, that was my palace,” said Creosote weakly. “I mean, I know it was a lot, but it was all I had.”

“Sorry.”

“But there were people in the city!”

“They’re probably all right,” said Rincewind.

“Good.”

“Whatever they are.”

“What?”

Conina grabbed his arm. “Don’t shout at him,” she said. “He’s not himself.”

“Ah,” said Creosote dourly, “an improvement.”

“I say, that’s a bit unfair,” Nijel protested. “I mean, he got me out of the snake pit and, well, he knows a lot—”

“Yes, wizards are good at getting you out of the sort of trouble that only wizards can get you into,” said Creosote. “Then they expect you to thank them.”

“Oh, I think—”

“It’s got to be said,” said Creosote, waving his hands irritably. He was briefly illuminated by the passage of another spell across the tormented sky.

“Look at that!” he snapped. “Oh, he means well. They all mean well. They probably all think the Disc would be a better place if they were in charge. Take it from me, there’s nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favor. Wizards! When all’s said and done, what good are they? I mean, can you name me something worthwhile any wizard’s done?”

“I think that’s a bit cruel,” said Conina, but with an edge in her voice that suggested that she could be open to persuasion on the subject.

“Well, they make me sick,” muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn’t like it much.

“I think we’ll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,” said Nijel diplomatically. “Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.”

“My mouth feels all horrible, too,” muttered Creosote, determined to cling onto the remnant of his anger.

Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.

“He’s gone!”

In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.

He hadn’t wanted much, ever. He’d stuck with wizardry even though he wasn’t any good at it, he’d always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he’d show them. Precisely who ‘they’ were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.

He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.

The Luggage was having problems of its own.

The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another’s clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.

Here is what it looked like.

It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.

Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn’t know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallizing on its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-colored corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.

It was hot and stuffy inside the tower. There were no internal floors, just a series of walkways around the walls. They were lined with wizards, and the central space was a column of octarine light that creaked loudly as they poured their power into it. At its base stood Abrim, the octarine gems on the hat blazing so brightly that they looked more like holes cut through into a different universe where, in defiance of probability, they had come out inside a sun.

The vizier stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes shut, mouth a thin line of concentration, balancing the forces. Usually a wizard could control power only to the extent of his own physical capability, but Abrim was learning fast.

You made yourself the pinch in the hourglass, the fulcrum on the balance, the roll around the sausage.

Do it right and you were the power, it was part of you and you were capable of—

Has it been pointed out that his feet were several inches off the ground? His feet were several inches off the ground.

Abrim was pulling together the potency for a spell that would soar away into the sky and beset the Ankh tower with a thousand screaming demons when there came a thunderous knock at the door.

There is a mantra to be said on these occasions. It doesn’t matter if the door is a tent flap, a scrap of hide on a windblown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in it or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of colored glass and a bell-push that plays a choice of twenty popular melodies that no music lover would want to listen to even after five years’ sensory deprivation.

One wizard turned to another and duly said: “I wonder who that can be at this time of night?”

There was another series of thumps on the woodwork.

“There can’t be anyone alive out there,” said the other wizard, and he said it nervously, because if you ruled out the possibility of it being anyone alive that always left the suspicion that perhaps it was someone dead.

This time the banging rattled the hinges.

“One of us had better go out,” said the first wizard.

“Good man.”

“Ah. Oh. Right.”

He set off slowly down the short, arched passage.

“I’ll just go and see who it is, then?” he said.

“First class.”

It was a strange figure that made its hesitant way to the door. Ordinary robes weren’t sufficient protection in the high-energy field inside tower, and over his brocade and velvet the wizard wore a thick, padded overall stuffed with rowan shavings and embroidered with industrial-grade sigils. He’d affixed a smoked glass visor to his pointy hat and his gauntlets, which were extremely big, suggested that he was a wicket keeper in a game of cricket played at supersonic speeds. The actinic flashes and pulsations from the great work in the main hall cast harsh shadows around him as he fumbled for the bolts.

He pulled down the visor and opened the door a fraction.

“We don’t want any—” he began, and ought to have chosen his words better, because they were his epitaph.

It was some time before his colleague noticed his continued absence, and wandered down the passage to find him. The door had been thrown wide open, the thaumatic inferno outside roaring against the web of spells that held it in check. In fact the door hadn’t been pushed completely back; he pulled it aside to see why, and gave a little whimper.

There was a noise behind him. He turned around.

“Wha—” he began, which is a pretty poor syllable on which to end a life.

High over the Circle Sea Rincewind was feeling like a bit of an idiot.

This happens to everyone sooner or later.

For example, in a tavern someone jogs your elbow and you turn around quickly and give a mouthful of abuse to, you become slowly aware, the belt buckle of a man who, it turns out, was probably hewn rather than born.

Or a little car runs into the back of yours and you rush out to show a bunch of fives to the driver who, it becomes apparent as he goes on unfolding more body like some horrible conjuring trick, must have been sitting on the back seat.

Or you might be leading your mutinous colleagues to the captain’s cabin and you hammer on the door and he sticks his great head out with a cutlass in either hand and you say “We’re taking over the ship, you scum, and the lads are right with me!” and he says “What lads?” and you suddenly feel a great emptiness behind you and you say “Um…”

In other words, it’s the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek.

Rincewind was still angry and humiliated and so forth, but these emotions had died down a bit and something of his normal character had reasserted itself. It was not very pleased to find itself on a few threads of blue and gold wool high above the phosphorescent waves.

He’d been heading for Ankh-Morpork. He tried to remember why.

Of course, it was where it had all started. Perhaps it was the presence of the University, which was so heavy with magic it lay like a cannonball on the incontinence blanket of the Universe, stretching reality very thin. Ankh was where things started, and finished.

It was also his home, such as it was, and it called to him.

It has already been indicated that Rincewind appeared to have a certain amount of rodent in his ancestry, and in times of stress he felt an overpowering urge to make a run for his burrow.

He let the carpet drift for a while on the air currents while dawn, which Creosote would probably have referred to as pink-fingered, made a ring of fire around the edge of the Disc. It spread its lazy light over a world that was subtly different.

Rincewind blinked. There was a weird light. No, now he came to think about it, not weird but wyrd, which was much weirder. It was like looking at the world through a heat haze, but a haze that had a sort of life of its own. It danced and stretched, and gave more than a hint that it wasn’t just an optical illusion but that it was reality itself that was being tensed and distended, like a rubber balloon trying to contain too much gas.

The wavering was greatest in the direction of Ankh-Morpork, where flashes and fountains of tortured air indicated that the struggle hadn’t abated. A similar column hung over Al Khali, and then Rincewind realized that it wasn’t the only one.

Wasn’t that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened onto the great Rim Ocean? And there were others.

It had all gone critical. Wizardry was breaking up. Goodbye to the University, the levels, the Orders; deep in his heart, every wizard knew that the natural unit of wizardry was one wizard. The towers would multiply and fight until there was one tower left, and then the wizards would fight until there was one wizard.

By then, he’d probably fight himself.

The whole edifice that operated as the balance wheel of magic was falling to bits. Rincewind resented that, deeply. He’d never been any good at magic, but that wasn’t the point. He knew where he fitted. It was right at the bottom, but at least he fitted. He could look up and see the whole delicate machine ticking away, gently, browsing off the natural magic generated by the turning of the Disc.

All he had was nothing, but that was something, and now it had been taken away.

Rincewind turned the carpet until it was facing the distant gleam that was Ankh-Morpork, which was a brilliant speck in the early morning light, and a part of his mind that wasn’t doing anything else wondered why it was so bright. There also seemed to be a full moon, and even Rincewind, whose grasp of natural philosophy was pretty vague, was sure there had been one of those only the other day.

Well, it didn’t matter. He’d had enough. He wasn’t going to try to understand anything anymore. He was going home.

Except that wizards can never go home.

This is one of the ancient and deeply meaningful sayings about wizards and it says something about most of them that they have never been able to work out what it means. Wizards aren’t allowed to have wives but they are allowed to have parents, and many of them go back to the old home town for Hogswatch Night or Soul Cake Thursday, for a bit of a sing-song and the heart-warming sight of all their boyhood bullies hurriedly avoiding them in the street.

It’s rather like the other saying they’ve never been able to understand, which is that you can’t cross the same river twice. Experiments with a long-legged wizard and a small river say you can cross the same river thirty, thirty-five times a minute.

Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like “cl.”

In this particular case, though, Rincewind couldn’t go home because it actually wasn’t there anymore. There was a city straddling the river Ankh, but it wasn’t one he’d ever seen before; it was white and clean and didn’t smell like a privy full of dead herrings.

He landed in what had once been the Plaza of Broken Moons, and also in a state of some shock. There were fountains. There had been fountains before, of course, but they had oozed rather than played and they had looked like thin soup. There were milky flagstones underfoot, with little glittery bits in them. And, although the sun was sitting on the horizon like half a breakfast grapefruit, there was hardly anyone around. Normally Ankh was permanently crowded, the actual shade of the sky being a mere background detail.

Smoke drifted over the city in long greasy coils from the crown of boiling air above the University. It was the only movement, apart from the fountains.

Rincewind had always been rather proud of the fact that he always felt alone, even in the teeming city, but it was even worse being alone when he was by himself.

He rolled up the carpet and slung it over one shoulder and padded through the haunted streets toward the University.

The gates hung open to the wind. Most of the building looked half ruined by misses and ricochets. The tower of sourcery, far too high to be real, seemed to be unscathed. Not so the old Tower of Art. Half the magic aimed at the tower next door seemed to have rebounded on it. Parts of it had melted and started to run; some parts glowed, some parts had crystalized, a few parts seemed to have twisted partly out of the normal three dimensions. It made you feel sorry even for stone that it should have to undergo such treatment. In fact nearly everything had happened to the tower except actual collapse. It looked so beaten that possibly even gravity had given up on it.

Rincewind sighed, and padded around the base of the tower toward the Library.

Towards where the Library had been.

There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.

Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.

Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of a bookcase still smouldered.

Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backward and forward across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.

They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.

Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.

The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.

There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas.

He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for some time until the end fell off.

Then he ate it.

“We shouldn’t have let him go like that,” said Conina.

“How could we have stopped him, oh, beauteous doe-eyed eaglet?”

“But he may do something stupid!”

“I should think that is very likely,” said Creosote primly.

“While we do something clever and sit on a baking beach with nothing to eat or drink, is that it?”

“You could tell me a story,” said Creosote, trembling slightly.

“Shut up.”

The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.

“I suppose a quick anecdote is out of the question?” he croaked.

Conina sighed. “There’s more to life than narrative, you know.”

“Sorry. I lost control a little, there.”

Now that the sun was well up the crushed-shell beach glowed like a salt flat. The sea didn’t look any better by daylight. It moved like thin oil.

Away on either side the beach stretched in long, excruciatingly flat curves, supporting nothing but a few clumps of withered dune grass which lived off the moisture in the spray. There was no sign of any shade.

“The way I see it,” said Conina, “this is a beach, and that means sooner or later we’ll come to a river, so all we have to do is keep walking in one direction.”

“And yet, delightful snow on the slopes of Mount Eritor, we do not know which one.”

Nijel sighed, and reached into his bag.

“Erm,” he said, “excuse me. Would this be any good? I stole it. Sorry.”

He held out the lamp that had been in the treasury.

“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he said hopefully. “I’ve heard about them, isn’t it worth a try?”

Creosote shook his head.

“But you said your grandfather used it to make his fortune!” said Conina.

‘A lamp,” said the Seriph, “he used a lamp. Not this lamp. No, the real lamp was a battered old thing, and one day this wicked pedlar came around offering new lamps for old and my great-grandmother gave it to him for this one. The family kept it in the vault as a sort of memorial to her. A truly stupid woman. It doesn’t work, of course.”

“You tried it?”

“No, but he wouldn’t have given it away if it was any good, would he?”

“Give it a rub,” said Conina. “It can’t do any harm.”

“I wouldn’t,” warned Creosote.

Nijel held the lamp gingerly. It had a strangely sleek look, as if someone had set out to make a lamp that could go fast.

He rubbed it.

The effects were curiously unimpressive. There was a half-hearted pop and a puff of wispy smoke near Nijel’s feet. A line appeared in the beach several feet away from the smoke. It spread quickly to outline a square of sand, which vanished.

A figure barrelled out of the beach, jerked to a stop, and groaned.

It was wearing a turban, an expensive tan, a small gold medallion, shiny shorts and advanced running shoes with curly toes.

It said, “I want to get this absolutely straight. Where am I?”

Conina recovered first.

“It’s a beach,” she said.

“Yah,” said the genie. “What I mean was, which lamp? What world?”