“Don’t you know?”

The creature took the lamp out of Nijel’s unresisting grasp.

“Oh, this old thing,” he said. “I’m on time share. Two weeks every August but, of course, usually one can never get away.”

“Got a lot of lamps, have you?” said Nijel.

“I am somewhat over-committed on lamps,” the genie agreed. “In fact I am thinking of diversifying into rings. Rings are looking big at the moment. There’s a lot of movement in rings. Sorry, people; what can I do you for?” The last phrase was turned in that special voice which people use for humorous self-parody, in the mistaken hope that it will make them sound less like a prat.

“We—” Conina began.

“I want a drink,” snapped Creosote. “And you are supposed to say that my wish is your command.”

“Oh, absolutely no one says that sort of thing anymore,” said the genie, and produced a glass out of nowhere. He treated Creosote to a brilliant smile lasting a small percentage of one second.

“We want you to take us across the sea to Ankh-Morpork,” said Conina firmly.

The genie looked blank. Then he pulled a very thick book^* from the empty air and consulted it.

“It sounds a really neat concept,” he said eventually. “Let’s do lunch next Tuesday, okay?”

“Do what?”

“I’m a little energetic right now.”

“You’re a little—?” Conina began.

“Great,” said the genie, sincerely, and glanced at his wrist. “Hey, is that the time?” He vanished.

The three of them looked at the lamp in thoughtful silence, and then Nijel said, “Whatever happened to, you know, the fat guys with the baggy trousers and I Hear And Obey O Master?”

Creosote snarled. He’d just drunk his drink. It had turned out to be water with bubbles in it and a taste like warm flatirons.

“I’m bloody well not standing for it,” snarled Conina. She snatched the lamp from his hand and rubbed it as if she was sorry she wasn’t holding a handful of emery cloth.

The genie reappeared at a different spot, which still managed to be several feet away from the weak explosion and obligatory cloud of smoke.

He was now holding something curved and shiny to his ear, and listening intently. He looked hurriedly at Conina’s angry face and contrived to suggest, by waggling his eyebrows and waving his free hand urgently, that he was currently and inconveniently tied up by irksome matters which, regretfully, prevented him giving her his full attention as of now but, as soon as he had disentangled himself from this importunate person, she could rest assured that her wish, which was certainly a wish of tone and brilliance, would be his command.

“I shall smash the lamp,” she said quietly.

The genie flashed her a smile and spoke hastily into the thing he was cradling between his chin and his shoulder.

“Fine,” he said. “Great. It’s a slice, believe me. Have your people call my people. Stay beyond, okay? Bye.” He lowered the instrument. “Bastard,” he said vaguely.

“I really shall smash the lamp,” said Conina.

“Which lamp is this?” said the genie hurriedly.

“How many have you got?” said Nijel. “I always thought genies had just the one.”

The genie explained wearily that in fact he had several lamps. There was a small but well-appointed lamp where he lived during the week, another rather unique lamp in the country, a carefully restored peasant rushlight in an unspoilt wine-growing district near Quirm, and just recently a set of derelict lamps in the docks area of Ankh-Morpork that had great potential, once the smart crowd got there, to become the occult equivalent of a suite of offices and a wine bar.

They listened in awe, like fish who had inadvertently swum into a lecture on how to fly.

“Who are your people the other people have got to call?” said Nijel, who was impressed, although he didn’t know why or by what.

“Actually, I don’t have any people yet,” said the genie, and gave a grimace that was definitely upwardly-mobile at the corners. “But I will.”

“Everyone shut up,” said Conina firmly, “and you, take us to Ankh-Morpork.”

“I should, if I were you,” said Creosote. “When the young lady’s mouth looks like a letter box, it’s best to do what she says.”

The genie hesitated.

“I’m not very deep on transport,” he said.

“Learn,” said Conina. She was tossing the lamp from hand to hand.

“Teleportation is a major headache,” said the genie, looking desperate. “Why don’t we do lun—”

“Right, that’s it,” said Conina. “Now I just need a couple of big flat rocks—”

“Okay, okay. Just hold hands, will you? I’ll give it my best shot, but this could be one big mistake—”

The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher^* who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.

And so psychic order was restored. Distance is, however, an entirely subjective phenomenon and creatures of magic can adjust it to suit themselves.

They are not necessarily very good at it.

Rincewind sat dejectedly in the blackened ruins of the Library, trying to put his finger on what was wrong with them.

Well, everything, for a start. It was unthinkable that the Library should be burned. It was the largest accumulation of magic on the Disc. It underpinned wizardry. Every spell ever used was written down in it somewhere. Burning them was, was, was…

There weren’t any ashes. Plenty of wood ashes, lots of chains, lots of blackened stone, lots of mess. But thousands of books don’t burn easily. They would leave bits of cover and piles of feathery ash. And there wasn’t any.

Rincewind stirred the rubble with his toe.

There was only the one door into the Library. Then there were the cellars—he could see the stairs down to them, choked with garbage—but you couldn’t hide all the books down there. You couldn’t teleport them out either, they would be resistant to such magic; anyone who tried something like that would end up wearing his brains outside his hat.

There was an explosion overhead. A ring of orange fire formed about halfway up the tower of sourcery, ascended quickly and soared off toward Quirm.

Rincewind slid around on his makeshift seat and stared up at the Tower of Art. He got the distinct impression that it was looking back at him. It was totally without windows, but for a moment he thought he saw a movement up among the crumbling turrets.

He wondered how old the tower really was. Older than the University, certainly. Older than the city, which had formed about it like screen around a mountain. Maybe older than geography. There had been a time when the continents were different, Rincewind understood, and then they’d sort of shuffled more comfortably together like puppies in a basket. Perhaps the tower had been washed up on the waves of rock, from somewhere else. Maybe it had been there before the Disc itself, but Rincewind didn’t like to consider that, because it raised uncomfortable questions about who built it and what for.

He examined his conscience.

It said: I’m out of options. Please yourself.

Rincewind stood up and brushed the dust and ash off his robe, removing quite a lot of the moulting red plush as well. He removed his hat, made a preoccupied attempt at straightening the point, and replaced it on his head.

Then he walked unsteadily toward the Tower of Art.

There was a very old and quite small door at the base. He wasn’t at all surprised when it opened as he approached.

“Strange place,” said Nijel. “Funny curve to the walls.”

“Where are we?” said Conina.

“And is there any alcohol?” said Creosote. “Probably not,” he added.

“And why is it rocking?” said Conina. “I’ve never been anywhere with metal walls before.” She sniffed. “Can you smell oil?” she added, suspiciously.

The genie reappeared, although this time without the smoke and erratic trapdoor effects. It was noticeable that he tried to keep as far away from Conina as politely possible.

“Everyone okay?” he said.

“Is this Ankh?” she said. “Only when we wanted to go there, we rather hoped you’d put us somewhere with a door.”

“You’re on your way,” said the genie.

“In what?”

Something about the way in which the spirit hesitated caused Nijel’s mind to leap a tall conclusion from a standing start. He looked down at the lamp in his hands.

He gave it an experimental jerk. The floor shook.

“Oh, no,” he said. “It’s physically impossible.”

“We’re in the lamp?” said Conina.

The room trembled again as Nijel tried to look down the spout.

“Don’t worry about it,” said the genie. “In fact, don’t think about it if possible.”

He explained—although “explained” is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length—that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.

“In the circumstances it is best not to think about it, yuh?” said the genie.

“Like not thinking about pink rhinoceroses,” said Nijel, and gave an embarrassed laugh as they stared at him.

“It was a sort of game we had,” he said. “You had to avoid thinking of pink rhinoceroses.” He coughed. “I didn’t say it was a particularly good game.”

He squinted down the spout again.

“No,” said Conina, “not very.”

“Uh,” said the genie, “Would anyone like coffee? Some sounds? A quick game of Significant Quest?^*

“Drink?” said Creosote.

“White wine?”

“Foul muck.”

The genie looked shocked.

“Red is bad for—” it began.

“—but any port in a storm,” said Creosote hurriedly. “Or sauterne, even. But no umbrella in it.” It dawned on the Seriph that this wasn’t the way to talk to the genie. He pulled himself together a bit. “No umbrella, by the Five Moons of Nasreem. Or bits of fruit salad or olives or curly straws or ornamental monkeys, I command thee by the Seventeen Siderites of Sarudin.”

“I’m not an umbrella person,” said the genie sulkily.

“It’s pretty sparse in here,” said Conina, “Why don’t you furnish it.”

“What I don’t understand,” said Nijel, “is, if we’re all in the lamp I’m holding, then the me in the lamp is holding a smaller lamp and in that lamp—”

The genie waved his hands urgently.

“Don’t talk about it!” he commanded. “Please!”

Nijel’s honest brow wrinkled. “Yes, but,” he said, “is there a lot of me, or what?”

“It’s all cyclic, but stop drawing attention to it, yuh?…Oh, shit.”

There was the subtle, unpleasant sound of the universe suddenly catching on.

It was dark in the tower, a solid core of antique darkness that had been there since the dawn of time and resented the intrusion of the upstart daylight that nipped in around Rincewind.

He felt the air move as the door shut behind him and the dark poured back, filling up the space where the light had been so neatly that you couldn’t have seen the join even if the light had still been there.

The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.

It took a great deal of courage to stand there in that dark. Rincewind didn’t have that much, but stood there anyway.

Something started to snuffle around his feet, and Rincewind stood very still. The only reason he didn’t move was for fear of treading on something worse.

Then a hand like an old leather glove touched his, very gently, and a voice said: “Oook.”

Rincewind looked up.

The dark yielded, just once, to a vivid flash of light. And Rincewind saw.

The whole tower was lined with books. They were squeezed on every step of the rotting spiral staircase that wound up inside. They were piled up on the floor, although something about the way in which they were piled suggested that the word “huddled” would be more appropriate. They had lodged—all right, they had perched—on every crumbling ledge.

They were observing him, in some covert way that had nothing to do with the normal six senses. Books are pretty good at conveying meaning, not necessarily their own personal meanings of course, and Rincewind grasped the fact that they were trying to tell him something.

There was another flash. He realized that it was magic from the sourcerer’s tower, reflected down from the distant hole that led onto the roof.

At least it enabled him to identify Wuffles, who was wheezing at his right foot. That was a bit of a relief. Now if he could just put a name to the soft, repetitive slithering noise near his left ear…

There was a further obliging flash, which found him looking directly into the little yellow eyes of the Patrician, who was clawing patiently at the side of his glass jar. It was a gentle, mindless scrabbling, as if the little lizard wasn’t particularly trying to get out but was just vaguely interested in seeing how long it would take to wear the glass away.

Rincewind looked down at the pear-shaped bulk of the Librarian.

“There’s thousands of them,” he whispered, his voice being sucked away and silenced by the massed ranks of books. “How did you get them all in here?”

“Oook oook.”

“They what?”

“Oook,” repeated the Librarian, making vigorous flapping motions with his bald elbows.

“Fly?”

“Oook.”

“Can they do that?”

“Oook,” nodded the Librarian.

“That must have been pretty impressive. I’d like to see that one day.”

“Oook.”

Not every book had made it. Most of the important grimoires had got out but a seven-volume herbal had lost its index to the flames and many a trilogy was mourning for its lost volume. Quite a few books had scorch marks on their bindings; some had lost their covers and trailed their stitching unpleasantly on the floor.

A match flared, and pages rippled uneasily around the walls. But it was only the Librarian, who lit a candle and shambled across the floor at the base of a menacing shadow big enough to climb skyscrapers. He had set up a rough table against one wall and it was covered with arcane tools, pots of rare adhesives and a bookbinder’s vice which was already holding a stricken folio. A few weak lines of magic fire crawled across it.

The ape pushed the candlestick into Rincewind’s hand, picked up a scalpel and a pair of tweezers, and bent low over the trembling book. Rincewind went pale.

“Um,” he said, “er, do you mind if I go away? I faint at the sight of glue.”

The Librarian shook his head and jerked a preoccupied thumb toward a tray of tools.

“Oook,” he commanded. Rincewind nodded miserably and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.

“What are you doing to it?” he managed.

“Oook.”

“An appendectomy? Oh.”

The ape jerked his thumb again, without looking up. Rincewind fished a needle and thread out of the ranks on the tray and handed them over. There was silence broken only by the scritching sound of thread being pulled through paper until the Librarian straightened up and said:

“Oook.”

Rincewind pulled out his handkerchief and mopped the ape’s brow.

“Oook.”

“Don’t mention it. Is it—going to be all right?”

The Librarian nodded. There was also a general, almost inaudible sigh of relief from the tier of books above them.

Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vise.

“All right,” he mumbled, “but what can I do about it?”

“Oook.” The Librarian gave Rincewind a look that would have been exactly like a quizzical look over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles, if he had been wearing any, and reached for another broken book.

“I mean, you know I’m no good at magic.”

“Oook.”

“The sourcery that’s about now, it’s terrible stuff. I mean, it’s the original stuff, from right back in the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.”

“Oook.”

“It’ll destroy everything eventually, won’t it?”

“Oook.”

“It’s about time someone put a stop to this sourcery, right?”

“Oook.”

“Only it can’t be me, you see. When I came here I thought I could do something, but that tower! It’s so big! It must be proof against all magic! If really powerful wizards won’t do anything about it, how can I?”

“Oook,” agreed the Librarian, sewing a ruptured spine.

“So, you see, I think someone else can save the world this time. I’m no good at it.”

The ape nodded, reached across and lifted Rincewind’s hat from his head.

“Hey!”

The Librarian ignored him, picked up a pair of shears.

“Look, that’s my hat, if you don’t mind don’t you dare do that to my—”

He leapt across the floor and was rewarded with a thump across the side of the head, which would have astonished him if he’d had time to think about it; the Librarian might shuffle around the place like a good-natured wobbly balloon, but underneath that oversized skin was a framework of superbly-cantilevered bone and muscle that could drive a fistful of calloused knuckles through a thick oak plank. Running into the Librarian’s arm was like hitting a hairy iron bar.

Wuffles started to bounce up and down, yelping with excitement.

Rincewind screamed a hoarse, untranslatable yell of fury, bounced off the wall, snatched up a fallen rock as a crude club, kicked forward and stopped dead.

The Librarian was crouched in the center of the floor with the shears touching—but not yet cutting—the hat.

And he was grinning at Rincewind.

They stood like a frozen tableau for some seconds. Then the ape dropped the shears, flicked several imaginary flecks of dust off the hat, straightened the point, and placed it on Rincewind’s head.

A few shocked moments after this Rincewind realized that he was holding up, at arm’s length, a very large and extremely heavy rock. He managed to force it away on one side before it recovered from the shock and remembered to fall on him.

“I see,” he said, sinking back against the wall and rubbing his elbows. “And all that’s supposed to tell me something, is it? A moral lesson, let Rincewind confront his true self, let him work out what he’s really prepared to fight for. Eh? Well, it was a very cheap trick. And I’ve news for you. If you think it worked—” he snatched the hat brim—“if you think it worked. If you think I’ve. You’ve got another thought. Listen, it’s. If you think.”

His voice stuttered into silence. Then he shrugged.

“All right. But when you get down to it, what can I actually do?”

The Librarian replied with an expansive gesture that indicated, as clearly as if he had said “oook,” that Rincewind was a wizard with a hat, a library of magical books and a tower. This could be regarded as everything a magical practitioner could need. An ape, a small terrier with halitosis and a lizard in a jar were optional extras.

Rincewind felt a slight pressure on his foot. Wuffles, who was extremely slow on the uptake, had fastened his toothless gums on the toe of Rincewind’s boot and was giving it a vicious suck.

He picked the little dog up by the scruff of its neck and the bristly stub that, for the want of a better word, it called its tail, and gently lifted it sideways.

“Okay,” he said. “You’d better tell me what’s been happening here.”

From the Carrack Mountains, overlooking the vast cold Sto Plain in the middle of which Ankh-Morpork sprawled like a bag of dropped groceries, the view was particularly impressive. Mishits and ricochets from the magical battle were expanding outward and upwards, in a bowl-shaped cloud of curdled air at the heart of which strange lights flashed and sparkled.

The roads leading away from it were packed with refugees, and every inn and wayside tavern was crowded out. Or nearly every one.

No one seemed to want to stop at the rather pleasant little pub nestling among trees just off the road to Quirm. It wasn’t that they were frightened to go inside, it was just that, for the moment, they weren’t being allowed to notice it.

There was a disturbance in the air about half a mile away and three figures dropped out of nowhere into a thicket of lavender.

They lay supine in the sunshine among the broken, fragrant branches, until their sanity came back. Then Creosote said, “Where are we, do you suppose?”

“It smells like someone’s underwear drawer,” said Conina.

“Not mine,” said Nijel, firmly.

He eased himself up gently and added, “Has anyone seen the lamp?”

“Forget it. It’s probably been sold to build a wine-bar,” said Conina.

Nijel scrabbled around among the lavender stems until his hands found something small and metallic.

“Got it!” he declared.

“Don’t rub it!” said the other two, in harmony. They were too late anyway, but that didn’t much matter, because all that happened when Nijel gave it a cautious buff was the appearance of some small smoking red letters in mid-air.

“‘Hi,’” Nijel read aloud. “‘Do not put down the lamp, because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity.’” He added, “You know, I think he’s a bit over-committed.”

Conina said nothing. She was staring out across the plains to the broiling storm of magic. Occasionally some of it would detach and soar away to some distant tower. She shivered, despite the growing heat of the day.

“We ought to get down there as soon as possible,” she said. “It’s very important.”

“Why?” said Creosote. One glass of wine hadn’t really restored him to his former easygoing nature.

Conina opened her mouth, and—quite unusually for her—shut it again. There was no way to explain that every gene in her body was dragging her onward, telling her that she should get involved; visions of swords and spiky balls on chains kept invading the hairdressing salons of her consciousness.

Nijel, on the other hand, felt no such pounding. All he had to drive him onward was imagination, but he did have enough of that to float a medium-sized war galley. He looked toward the city with what would have been, but for his lack of chin, an expression of set-jawed determination.

Creosote realized that he was outnumbered.

“Do they have any drink down there?” he said.

“Lots,” said Nijel.

“That might do for a start,” the Seriph conceded. “All right, lead on, O peach-breasted daughter of—”

“And no poetry.”

They untangled themselves from the thicket and walked down the hillside until they reached the road which, before very long, went past the aforementioned tavern or, as Creosote persisted in calling it, caravanserai.

They hesitated about going in. It didn’t seem to welcome visitors. But Conina, who by breeding and upbringing tended to skulk around the back of buildings, found four horses tethered in the yard.

They considered them carefully.

“It would be stealing,” said Nijel, slowly.

Conina opened her mouth to agree and the words “Why not?” slid past her lips. She shrugged.

“Perhaps we should leave some money—” Nijel suggested.

“Don’t look at me,” said Creosote.

“—or maybe write a note and leave it under the bridle. Or something. Don’t you think?”

By way of an answer Conina vaulted up onto the largest horse, which by the look of it belonged to a soldier. Weaponry was slung all over it.

Creosote hoisted himself uneasily onto the second horse, a rather skittish bay, and sighed.

“She’s got that letter-box look,” he said. “I should do what she says.”

Nijel regarded the other two horses suspiciously. One of them was very large and extremely white, not the offwhite which was all that most horses could manage, but a translucent, ivory white tone which Nijel felt an unconscious urge to describe as “shroud.” It also gave him a distinct impression that it was more intelligent than he was.

He selected the other one. It was a bit thin, but docile, and he managed to get on after only two tries.

They set off.

The sound of their hoofbeats barely penetrated the gloom inside the tavern. The innkeeper moved like someone in a dream. He knew he had customers, he’d even spoken to them, he could even see them sitting around a table by the fire, but if asked to describe who he’d talked to and what he had seen he’d have been at a loss. This is because the human brain is remarkably good at shutting out things it doesn’t want to know. His could currently have shielded a bank vault.

And the drinks! Most of them he’d never heard of, but strange bottles kept appearing on the shelves above the beer barrels. The trouble was that whenever he tried to think about it, his thoughts just slid away…

The figures around the table looked up from their cards.

One of them raised a hand. It’s stuck on the end of his arm and it’s got five fingers, the innkeeper’s mind said. It must be a hand.

One thing the innkeeper’s brain couldn’t shut out was the sound of the voices. This one sounded as though someone was hitting a rock with a roll of sheet lead.

BAR PERSON.

The innkeeper groaned faintly. The thermic lances of horror were melting their way steadily through the steel door of his mind.

LET ME SEE, NOW. THAT’S A—WHAT WAS IT AGAIN?

“A Bloody Mary.” This voice made a simple drinks order sound like the opening of hostilities.

OH, YES. AND—

“Mine was a small egg nog,” said Pestilence.

AN EGG NOG.

“With a cherry in it.”

GOOD, lied the heavy voice. AND THAT’LL BE A SMALL PORT WINE FOR ME AND, the speaker glanced across the table at the fourth member of the quartet and sighed, YOU’D BETTER BRING ANOTHER BOWL OF PEANUTS.

About three hundred yards down the road the horse thieves were trying to come to terms with a new experience.

“Certainly a smooth ride,” Nijel managed eventually.

“And a lovely—a lovely view,” said Creosote, his voice lost in the slipstream.

“But I wonder,” said Nijel, “if we have done exactly the right thing.”

“We’re moving, aren’t we?” demanded Conina. “Don’t be petty.”

“It’s just that, well, looking at cumulus clouds from above is—”

“Shut up.”

“Sorry.”

“Anyway, they’re stratus. Strato-cumulus at most.”

“Right,” said Nijel miserably.

“Does it make any difference?” said Creosote, who was lying flat on his horse’s neck with his eyes shut.

“About a thousand feet.”

“Oh.”

“Could be seven hundred and fifty,” conceded Conina.

“Ah.”

The tower of sourcery trembled. Colored smoke rolled through its vaulted rooms and shining corridors. In the big room at the very tip, where the air was thick and greasy and tasted of burning tin, many wizards had passed out with the sheer mental effort of the battle. But enough remained. They sat in a wide circle, locked in concentration.

It was just possible to see the shimmering in the air as the raw sourcery swirled out of the staff in Coin’s hand and into the center of the octogram.

Outlandish shapes appeared for a brief instant and vanished. The very fabric of reality was being put through the wringer in there.

Carding shuddered and turned away in case he saw anything he really couldn’t ignore.

The surviving senior wizards had a simulacrum of the Disc hovering in front of them. As Carding looked at it again the little red glow over the city of Quirm flared and went out.

The air creaked.

“There goes Quirm,” murmured Carding.

“That just leaves Al Khali,” said one of the others.

“There’s some clever power there.”

Carding nodded glumly. He’d quite liked Quirm, which was a—had been a pleasant little city overlooking the Rim Ocean.

He dimly recalled being taken there, once, when he was small. For a moment he gazed sadly into the past. It had wild geraniums, he recalled, filling the sloping cobbled streets with their musky fragrance.

“Growing out of the walls,” he said out loud. “Pink. They were pink.”

The other wizards looked at him oddly. One or two, of a particularly paranoid frame of mind even for wizards, glanced suspiciously at the walls.

“Are you all right?” said one of them.

“Um?” said Carding. “Oh. Yes, Sorry. Miles away.”

He turned back to look at Coin, who was sitting off to one side of the circle with the staff across his knees. The boy appeared to be asleep. Perhaps he was. But Carding knew in the tormented pit of his soul that the staff didn’t sleep. It was watching him, testing his mind.

It knew. It even knew about the pink geraniums.

“I never wanted it to be like this,” he said softly. “All we really wanted was a bit of respect.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Carding nodded vaguely. As his colleagues resumed their concentration he glanced sideways at them.

Somehow, all his old friends had gone. Well, not friends. A wizard never had friends, at least not friends who were wizards. It needed a different word. Ah yes, that was it. Enemies. But a very decent class of enemies. Gentlemen. The cream of their profession. Not like these people, for all that they seemed to have risen in the craft since the sourcerer had arrived.

Other things besides the cream floated to the top, he reflected sourly.

He turned his attention to Al Khali, probing with his mind, knowing that the wizards there were almost certainly doing the same, seeking constantly for a point of weakness.

He thought: Am I a point of weakness? Spelter tried to tell me something. It was about the staff. A man should lean on his staff, not the other way around…it’s steering him, leading him…I wish I’d listened to Spelter…this is wrong, I’m a point of weakness…

He tried again, riding the surges of power, letting them carry his mind into the enemy tower. Even Abrim was making use of sourcery, and Carding let himself modulate the wave, insinuating himself past the defenses erected against him.

The image of the interior of the Al Khali tower appeared, focused…

…the Luggage trundled along the glowing corridors. It was exceedingly angry now. It had been awoken from hibernation, it had been scorned, it had been briefly attacked by a variety of mythological and now extinct lifeforms, it had a headache and now, as it entered the Great Hall, it detected the hat. The horrible hat, the cause of everything it was currently suffering. It advanced purposefully…

Carding, testing the resistance of Abrim’s mind, felt the man’s attention waver. For a moment he saw through the enemy’s eyes, saw the squat oblong cantering across the stone. For a moment Abrim attempted to shift his concentration and then, no more able to help himself than is a cat when it sees something small and squeaky run across the floor, Carding struck.

Not much. It didn’t need much. Abrim’s mind was attempting to balance and channel huge forces, and it needed hardly any pressure to topple it from its position.

Abrim extended his hands to blast the Luggage, gave the merest beginnings of a scream, and imploded.

The wizards around him thought they saw him grow impossibly small in a fraction of a second and vanish, leaving a black after-image…

The more intelligent of them started to run…

And the magic he had been controlling surged back out and flooded free in one great, randomized burst that blew the hat to bits, took out the entire lower levels of the tower and quite a large part of what remained of the city.

So many wizards in Ankh had been concentrating on the hall that the sympathetic resonance blew them across the room. Carding ended up on his back, his hat over his eyes.

They hauled him out and dusted him off and carried him to Coin and the staff, amid cheers—although some of the older wizards forbore to cheer. But he didn’t seem to pay any attention.

He stared sightlessly down at the boy, and then slowly raised his hands to his ears.

“Can’t you hear them?” he said.

The wizards fell silent. Carding still had power, and the tone of his voice would have quelled a thunderstorm.

Coin’s eyes glowed.

“I hear nothing,” he said.

Carding turned to the rest of the wizards.

“Can’t you hear them?”

They shook their heads. One of them said, “Hear what, brother?”

Carding smiled, and it was a wide, mad smile. Even Coin took a step backwards.

“You’ll hear them soon enough,” he said. “You’ve made a beacon. You’ll all hear them. But you won’t hear them for long.” He pushed aside the younger wizards who were holding his arms and advanced on Coin.

“You’re pouring sourcery into the world and other things are coming with it,” he said. “Others have given them a pathway but you’ve given them an avenue!”

He sprang forward and snatched the black staff out of Coin’s hands and swung it up in the air to smash it against the wall.

Carding went rigid as the staff struck back. Then his skin began to blister…

Most of the wizards managed to turn their heads away. A few—and there are always a few like that—watched in obscene fascination.

Coin watched, too. His eyes widened in wonder. One hand went to his mouth. He tried to back away. He couldn’t.

“They’re cumulus.”

“Marvelous,” said Nijel weakly.

WEIGHT DOESN’T COME INTO IT. MY STEED HAS CARRIED ARMIES. MY STEED HAS CARRIED CITIES. YEA, HE HATH CARRIED ALL THINGS IN THEIR DUE TIME, said Death. BUT HE’S NOT GOING TO CARRY YOU THREE.

“Why not?”

IT’S A MATTER OF THE LOOK OF THE THING.

“It’s going to look pretty good, then, isn’t it,” said War testily, “the One Horseman and Three Pedestrians of the Apocralypse.”

“Perhaps you could ask them to wait for us?” said Pestilence, his voice sounding like something dripping out of the bottom of a coffin.

I HAVE THINGS TO ATTEND TO, said Death. He made a little clicking noise with his teeth. I’M SURE YOU’LL MANAGE. YOU NORMALLY DO.

War watched the retreating horse.

“Sometimes he really gets on my nerves. Why is he always so keen to have the last word?” he said.

“Force of habit, I suppose.”

They turned back to the tavern. Neither spoke for some time, and then War said, “Where’s Famine?”

“Went to find the kitchen.”

“Oh.” War scuffed one armored foot in the dust, and thought about the distance to Ankh. It was a very hot afternoon. The Apocralypse could jolly well wait.

“One for the road?” he suggested.

“Should we?” said Pestilence, doubtfully. “I thought we were expected. I mean, I wouldn’t like to disappoint people.”

“We’ve got time for a quick one, I’m sure,” War insisted. “Pub clocks are never right. We’ve got bags of time. All the time in the world.”

Carding slumped forward and thudded on the shining white floor. The staff rolled out of his hands and upended itself.

Coin prodded the limp body with his foot.

“I did warn him,” he said. “I told him what would happen if he touched it again. What did he mean, them?”

There was an outbreak of coughing and a considerable inspection of fingernails.

“What did he mean?” Coin demanded.

Ovin Hakardly, lecturer in Lore, once again found that the wizards around him were parting like morning mist. Without moving he appeared to have stepped forward. His eyes swivelled backwards and forward like trapped animals.

“Er,” he said. He waved his thin hands vaguely. “The world, you see, that is, the reality in which we live, in fact, it can be thought of as, in a manner of speaking, a rubber sheet.” He hesitated, aware that the sentence was not going to appear in anyone’s book of quotable quotes.

“In that,” he added hurriedly, “it is distorted, uh, distended by the presence of magic in any degree and, if I may make a point here, too much magical potentiality, if foregathered in one spot, forces our reality, um, downwards, although of course one should not take the term literally (because in no sense do I seek to suggest a physical dimension) and it has been postulated that a sufficient exercise of magic can, shall we say, um, break through the actuality at its lowest point and offer, perhaps, a pathway to the inhabitants or, if I may use a more correct term, denizens of the lower plane (which is called by the loose-tongued the Dungeon Dimensions) who, because perhaps of the difference in energy levels, are naturally attracted to the brightness of this world. Our world.”

There was the typical long pause which usually followed Hakardly’s speeches, while everybody mentally inserted commas and stitched the fractured clauses together.

Coin’s lips moved silently for a while. “Do you mean magic attracts these creatures?” he said eventually.

His voice was quite different now. It lacked its former edge. The staff hung in the air above the prone body of Carding, rotating slowly. The eyes of every wizard in the place were on it.

“So it appears,” said Hakardly. “Students of such things say their presence is heralded by a coarse susurration.”

Coin looked uncertain.

“They buzz,” said one of the other wizards helpfully.

The boy knelt down and peered closely at Carding.

“He’s very still,” he said cautiously. “Is anything bad happening to him?”

“It may be,” said Hakardly, guardedly. “He’s dead.”

“I wish he wasn’t.”

“It is a view, I suspect, which he shares.”

“But I can help him,” said Coin. He held out his hands and the staff glided into them. If it had a face, it would have smirked.

When he spoke next his voice once again had the cold distant tones of someone speaking in a steel room.

“If failure had no penalty success would not be a prize,” he said.

“Sorry?” said Hakardly. “You’ve lost me there.”

Coin turned on his heel and strode back to his chair.

“We can fear nothing,” he said, and it sounded more like a command. “What of these Dungeon Dimensions? If they should trouble us, away with them! A true wizard will fear nothing! Nothing!”

He jerked to his feet again and strode to the simulacrum of the world. The image was perfect in every detail, down to a ghost of Great A’Tuin paddling slowly through the interstellar deeps a few inches above the floor.

Coin waved his hand through it disdainfully.

“Ours is a world of magic,” he said. “And what can be found in it that can stand against us?”

Hakardly thought that something was expected of him.

“Absolutely no one,” he said. “Except for the gods, of course.”

There was a dead silence.

“The gods?” said Coin quietly.

“Well, yes. Certainly. We don’t challenge the gods. They do their job, we do ours. No sense in—”

“Who rules the Disc? Wizards or gods?”

Hakardly thought quickly.

“Oh, wizards. Of course. But, as it were, under the gods.”

When one accidentally puts one boot in a swamp it is quite unpleasant. But not as unpleasant as pushing down with the other boot and hearing that, too, disappear with a soft sucking noise. Hakardly pressed on.

“You see, wizardry is more—”

“Are we not more powerful than the gods, then?” said Coin.

Some of the wizards at the back of the crowd began to shuffle their feet.

“Well. Yes and no,” said Hakardly, up to his knees in it now.

The truth was that wizards tended to be somewhat nervous about the gods. The beings who dwelt on Cori Celesti had never made their feelings plain on the subject of ceremonial magic, which after all had a certain godness about it, and wizards tended to avoid the whole subject. The trouble with gods was that if they didn’t like something they didn’t just drop hints, so common sense suggested that it was unwise to put the gods in a position where they had to decide.

“There seems to be some uncertainty?” said Coin.

“If I may counsel—” Hakardly began.

Coin waved a hand. The walls vanished. The wizards stood at the top of the tower of sourcery, and as one man their eyes turned to the distant pinnacle of Cori Celesti, home of the gods.

“When you’ve beaten everyone else, there’s only the gods left to fight,” said Coin. “Have any of you seen the gods?”

There was a chorus of hesitant denials.

“I will show them to you.”

“You’ve got room for another one in there, old son,” said War.

Pestilence swayed unsteadily. “I’m sure we should be getting along,” he muttered, without much conviction.

“Oh, go on.”

“Just a half, then. And then we really must be going.”

War slapped him on the back and glared at Famine.

“And we’d better have another fifteen bags of peanuts,” he added.

“Oook,” the Librarian concluded.

“Oh,” said Rincewind. “It’s the staff that’s the problem, then.”

“Oook.”

“Hasn’t anyone tried to take it away from him?”

“Oook.”

“What happened to them, then?”

“Eeek.”

Rincewind groaned.

The Librarian had put his candle out because the presence of the naked flame was unsettling the books, but now that Rincewind had grown accustomed to the dark, he realized it wasn’t dark at all. The soft octarine glow from the books filled the inside of the tower with something that, while it wasn’t exactly light, was a blackness you could see by. Now and again the ruffle of stiff pages floated down from the gloom.

“So, basically, there’s no way our magic could defeat him, isn’t that right?”

The Librarian oooked disconsolate agreement and continued to spin around gently on his bottom.

“Pretty pointless, then. It may have struck you that I am not exactly gifted in the magical department. I mean, any duel is going to go on the lines of ‘Hallo, I’m Rincewind’ closely followed by bazaam!”

“Oook.”

“Basically, what you’re saying is that I’m on my own.”

“Oook.”

“Thanks.”

By their own faint glow Rincewind regarded the books that had stacked themselves around the inner walls of the ancient tower.

He sighed and marched briskly to the door, but slowed down noticeably as he reached it.

“I’ll be off, then,” he said.

“Oook.”

“To face who knows what dreadful perils,” Rincewind added. “To lay down my life in the service of mankind—”

“Eeek.”

“All right, bipeds—”

“Woof.”

“—and quadrapeds, all right.” He glanced at the Patrician’s jamjar, a beaten man.

“And lizards,” he added. “Can I go now?”

A gale was howling down out of a clear sky as Rincewind toiled toward the tower of sourcery. Its high white doors were shut so tightly it was barely possible to see their outline in the milky surface of the stone.

He hammered on it for a bit, but nothing much happened. The doors seemed to absorb the sound.

“Fine thing,” he muttered to himself, and remembered the carpet. It was lying where he had left it, which was another sign that Ankh had changed. In the thieving days before the sourcerer nothing stayed for long where you left it. Nothing printable, anyway.

He rolled it out on the cobbles so that the golden dragons writhed against the blue ground, unless of course the blue dragons were flying against a golden sky.

He sat down.

He stood up.

He sat down again and hitched up his robe and, with some effort, unrolled one of his socks. Then he replaced his boot and wandered around for a bit until he found, among the rubble, a half-brick. He inserted the half-brick into the sock and gave the sock a few thoughtful swings.

Rincewind had grown up in Morpork. What a Morpork citizen liked to have on his side in a fight was odds of about twenty to one, but failing that a sockful of half-brick and a dark alley to lurk in was generally considered a better bet than any two magic swords you cared to name.

He sat down again.

“Up,” he commanded.

The carpet did not respond. Rincewind peered at the pattern, then lifted a corner of the carpet and tried to make out if the underside was any better.

“All right,” he conceded, “down. Very, very carefully. Down.”

“Sheep,” slurred War. “It was sheep.” His helmeted head hit the bar with a clang. He raised it again. “Sheep.”

“Nonono,” said Famine, raising a thin finger unsteadily. “Some other domess…dummist…tame animal. Like pig. Heifer. Kitten? Like that. Not sheep.”

“Bees,” said Pestilence, and slid gently out of his seat.

“Okay,” said War, ignoring him, “right. Once again, then. From the top.” He rapped the side of his glass for the note.

“We are poor little…unidentified domesticated animals…that have lost our way…” he quavered.

“Baabaabaa,” muttered Pestilence, from the floor.

War shook his head. “It isn’t the same, you know,” he said. “Not without him. He used to come in beautifully on the bass.”

“Baabaabaa,” Pestilence repeated.

“Oh, shut up,” said War, and reached uncertainly for a bottle.

The gale buffeted the top of the tower, a hot, unpleasant wind that whispered with strange voices and rubbed the skin like fine sandpaper.

In the center of it Coin stood with the staff over his head. As dust filled the air the wizards saw the lines of magic force pouring from it.

They curved up to form a vast bubble that expanded until it must have been larger than the city. And shapes appeared in it. They were shifting and indistinct, wavering horribly like visions in a distorting mirror, no more substantial than smoke rings or pictures in the clouds, but they were dreadfully familiar.

There, for a moment, was the fanged snout of Offler. There, clear for an instant in the writhing storm, was Blind Io, chief of the gods, with his orbiting eyes.

Coin muttered soundlessly and the bubble began to contract. It bulged and jerked obscenely as the things inside fought to get out, but they could not stop the contraction.

Now it was bigger than the University grounds.

Now it was taller than the tower.

Now it was twice the height of a man, and smoke gray.

Now it was an iridescent pearl, the size of…well, the size of a large pearl.

The gale had gone, replaced by a heavy, silent calm. The very air groaned with the strain. Most of the wizards were flat on the floor, pressed there by the unleashed forces that thickened the air and deadened sound like a universe of feathers, but every one of them could hear his own heart beating loud enough to smash the tower.

“Look at me,” Coin commanded.

They turned their eyes upwards. There was no way they could disobey.

He held the glistening thing in one hand. The other held the staff, which had smoke pouring from its ends.

“The gods,” he said. “Imprisoned in a thought. And perhaps they were never more than a dream.”

His voice become older, deeper. “Wizards of Unseen University,” it said, “have I not given you absolute dominion?”

Behind them the carpet rose slowly over the side of the tower, with Rincewind trying hard to keep his balance. His eyes were wide with the sort of terror that comes naturally to anyone standing on a few threads and several hundred feet of empty air.

He lurched off the hovering thing and onto the tower, swinging the loaded sock around his head in wide, dangerous sweeps.

Coin saw him reflected in the astonished stares of the assembled wizards. He turned carefully and watched the wizard stagger erratically toward him.

“Who are you?” he said.

“I have come,” said Rincewind thickly, “to challenge the sourcerer. Which one is he?”

He surveyed the prostrate wizardry, hefting the half-brick in one hand.

Hakardly risked a glance upwards and made frantic eyebrow movements at Rincewind who, even at the best of times, wasn’t much good at interpreting non-verbal communication. This wasn’t the best of times.

“With a sock?” said Coin. “What good is a sock?”

The arm holding the staff rose. Coin looked down at it in mild astonishment.

“No, stop,” he said. “I want to talk to this man.” He stared at Rincewind, who was swaying back and forth under the influence of sleeplessness, horror and the after-effects of an adrenaline overdose.

“Is it magical?” he said, curiously. “Perhaps it is the sock of an Archchancellor? A sock of force?”

Rincewind focused on it.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think I bought it in a shop or something. Um. I’ve got another one somewhere.”

“But in the end it has something heavy?”

“Um. Yes,” said Rincewind. He added, “It’s a half-brick.”

“But it has great power.”

“Er. You can hold things up with it. If you had another one, you’d have a brick.” Rincewind spoke slowly. He was assimilating the situation by a kind of awful osmosis, and watching the staff turn ominously in the boy’s hand.

“So. It is a brick of ordinariness, within a sock. The whole becoming a weapon.”

“Um. Yes.”

“How does it work?”

“Um. You swing it, and then you. Hit something with it. Or sometimes the back of your hand, sometimes.”

“And then perhaps it destroys a whole city?” said Coin.

Rincewind stared into Coin’s golden eyes, and then at his sock. He had pulled it on and off several times a year for years. It had darns he’d grown to know and lo—well, know. Some of them had whole families of darns of their own. There were a number of descriptions that could be applied to the sock, but slayer-of-cities wasn’t among them.

“Not really,” he said at last. “It sort of kills people but leaves buildings standing.”

Rincewind’s mind was operating at the speed of continental drift. Parts of it were telling him that he was confronting the sourcerer, but they were in direct conflict with other parts. Rincewind had heard quite a lot about the power of the sourcerer, the staff of the sourcerer, the wickedness of the sourcerer and so on. The only thing no one had mentioned was the age of the sourcerer.

He glanced toward the staff.

“And what does that do?” he said slowly.

And the staff said, You must kill this man.

The wizards, who had been cautiously struggling upright, flung themselves flat again.

The voice of the hat had been bad enough, but the voice of the staff was metallic and precise; it didn’t sound as though it was offering advice but simply stating the way the future had to be. It sounded quite impossible to ignore.

Coin half-raised his arm, and hesitated.

“Why?” he said.

You do not disobey me.

“You don’t have to,” said Rincewind hurriedly. “It’s only a thing.”

“I do not see why I should hurt him,” said Coin. “He looks so harmless. Like an angry rabbit.”

He defies us.

“Not me,” said Rincewind, thrusting the arm with the sock behind his back and trying to ignore the bit about the rabbit.

“Why should I do everything you tell me?” said Coin to the staff. “I always do everything you tell me, and it doesn’t help people at all.”

People must fear you. Have I taught you nothing?

“But he looks so funny. He’s got a sock,” said Coin.

He screamed, and his arm jerked oddly. Rincewind’s hair stood on end.

You will do as you are commanded.

“I won’t.”

You know what happens to boys who are bad.

There was a crackle and a smell of scorched flesh. Coin dropped to his knees.

“Here, hang on a minute—” Rincewind began.

Coin opened his eyes. They were gold still, but flecked with brown.

Rincewind swung his sock around in a wide humming arc that connected with the staff halfway along its length. There was a brief explosion of brick dust and burnt wool and the staff spun out of the boy’s hand. Wizards scattered as it tumbled end over end across the floor.

It reached the parapet, bounced upwards and shot over the edge.

But, instead of falling, it steadied itself in the air, spun in its own length and sped back again trailing octarine sparks and making a noise like a buzzsaw.

Rincewind pushed the stunned boy behind him, threw away the ravaged sock and whipped his hat off, flailing wildly as the staff bored toward him. It caught him on the side of the head, delivering a shock that almost welded his teeth together and toppled him like a thin and ragged tree.

The staff turned again in mid-air, glowing red-hot now, and swept back for another and quite definitely final run.

Rincewind struggled up on his elbows and watched in horrified fascination as it swooped through the chilly air which, for some reason he didn’t understand, seemed to be full of snowflakes.

And became tinged with purple, blotched with blue. Time slowed and ground to a halt like an underwound phonograph.

Rincewind looked up at the tall black figure that had appeared a few feet away.

It was, of course, Death.

He turned his glowing eyesockets toward Rincewind and said, in a voice like the collapse of undersea chasms, GOOD AFTERNOON.

He turned away as if he had completed all necessary business for the time being, stared at the horizon for a while, and started to tap one foot idly. It sounded like a bagful of maracas.

“Er,” said Rincewind.

Death appeared to remember him. I’M SORRY? he said politely.

“I always wondered how it was going to be,” said Rincewind.

Death took an hourglass out from the mysterious folds of his ebon robes and peered at it.

DID YOU? he said, vaguely.

“I suppose I can’t complain,” said Rincewind virtuously. “I’ve had a good life. Well, quite good.” He hesitated. “Well, not all that good. I suppose most people would call it pretty awful.” He considered it further. “I would,” he added, half to himself.

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT, MAN?

Rincewind was nonplussed. “Don’t you make an appearance when a wizard is about to die?”

OF COURSE. AND I MUST SAY YOU PEOPLE ARE GIVING ME A BUSY DAY.

“How do you manage to be in so many places at the same time?”

GOOD ORGANIZATION.

Time returned. The staff, which had been hanging in the air a few feet away from Rincewind, started to scream forward again.

And there was a metallic thud as Coin caught it one-handedly in mid-flight.

The staff uttered a noise like a thousand fingernails dragging across glass. It thrashed wildly up and down, flailing at the arm that held it, and bloomed into evil green flame along its entire length.

So. At the last, you fail me.

Coin groaned but held on as the metal under his fingertips went red, then white.

He thrust the arm out in front of him, and the force streaming from the staff roared past him and drew sparks from his hair and whipped his robe up into weird and unpleasant shapes. He screamed and whirled the staff around and smashed it on the parapet, leaving a long bubbling line in the stone.

Then he threw it away. It clattered against the stones and rolled to a halt, wizards scattering out of its path.

Coin sagged to his knees, shaking.

“I don’t like killing people,” he said. “I’m sure it can’t be right.”

“Hold onto that thought,” said Rincewind fervently.

“What happens to people after they’re dead?” said Coin.

Rincewind glanced up at Death.

“I think this one’s for you,” he said.

HE CANNOT SEE OR HEAR ME, said Death, UNTIL HE WANTS TO.

There was a little clinking noise. The staff was rolling back toward Coin, who looked down at it in horror.

Pick me up.

“You don’t have to,” said Rincewind again.

You cannot resist me. You cannot defeat yourself, said the staff.

Coin reached out very slowly, and picked it up.

Rincewind glanced at his sock. It was a stub of burnt wool, its brief career as a weapon of war having sent it beyond the help of any darning needle.

Now kill him.

Rincewind held his breath. The watching wizards held their breath. Even Death, who had nothing to hold but his scythe, held it tensely.

“No,” said Coin.

You know what happens to boys who are bad.

Rincewind saw the sourcerer’s face go pale.

The staff’s voice changed. Now it wheedled.

Without me, who would there be to tell you what to do?

“That is true,” said Coin slowly.

See what you have achieved.

Coin stared slowly around at the frightened faces.

“I am seeing,” he said.

I taught you everything I know.

“I am thinking,” said Coin, “that you do not know enough.”

Ingrate! Who gave you your destiny?

“You did,” said the boy. He raised his head.

“I realize that I was wrong,” he added, quietly.

Good—

“I did not throw you far enough!”

Coin got to his feet in one movement and swung the staff over his head. He stood still as a statue, his hand lost in a ball of light that was the color of molten copper. It turned green, ascended through shades of blue, hovered in the violet and then seared into pure octarine.

Rincewind shaded his eyes against the glare and saw Coin’s hand, still whole, still gripping tight, with beads of molten metal glittering between his fingers.

He slithered away, and bumped into Hakardly. The old wizard was standing like a statue, with his mouth open.

“What’ll happen?” said Rincewind.

“He’ll never beat it,” said Hakardly hoarsely. “It’s his. It’s as strong as him. He’s got the power, but it knows how to channel it.”

“You mean they’ll cancel each other out?”

“Hopefully.”

The battle was hidden in its own infernal glow. Then the floor began to tremble.

“They’re drawing on everything magical,” said Hakardly. “We’d better leave the tower.”

“Why?”

“I imagine it will vanish soon enough.”

And, indeed, the white flagstones around the glow looked as though they were unravelling and disappearing into it.

Rincewind hesitated.

“Aren’t we going to help him?” he said.

Hakardly stared at him, and then at the iridescent tableau. His mouth opened and shut once or twice.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Yes, but just a bit of help on his side, you’ve seen what that thing is like—”

“I’m sorry.”

“He helped you.” Rincewind turned on the other wizards, who were scurrying away. “All of you. He gave you what you wanted, didn’t he?”

“We may never forgive him,” said Hakardly.

Rincewind groaned.

“What will be left when it’s all over?” he said. “What will be left?”

Hakardly looked down.

“I’m sorry,” he repeated.

The octarine light had grown brighter and was beginning to turn black around the edge. It wasn’t the black that is merely the opposite of light, though; it was the grainy, shifting blackness that glows beyond the glare and has no business in any decent reality. And it buzzed.

Rincewind did a little dance of uncertainty as his feet, legs, instincts and incredibly well-developed sense of self-preservation overloaded his nervous system to the point where, just as it was on the point of fusing, his conscience finally got its way.

He leapt into the fire and reached the staff.

The wizards fled. Several of them levitated down from the tower.

They were a lot more perspicacious than those that used the stairs because, about thirty seconds later, the tower vanished.

The snow continued to fall around a column of blackness, which buzzed.

And the surviving wizards who dared to look back saw, tumbling slowly down the sky, a small object trailing flames behind it. It crashed into the cobbles, where it smouldered for a bit before the thickening snow put it out.

Pretty soon it became just a small mound.

A little while later a squat figure swung itself across the courtyard on its knuckles, scrabbled in the snow, and hauled the thing out.

It was, or rather it had been, a hat. Life had not been kind to it. A large part of the wide brim had been burned off, the point was entirely gone, and the tarnished silver letters were almost unreadable. Some of them had been torn off in any case. Those that were left spelled out: WIZD.

The Librarian turned around slowly. He was entirely alone, except for the towering column of burning blackness and the steadily falling flakes.

The ravaged campus was empty. There were a few other pointy hats that had been trampled by terrified feet, and no other sign that people had been there.

All the wizards were wazards.

“War?”

“Wazzat?”

“Wasn’t there,” Pestilence groped for his glass, “something?”

“Wazzat?”

“We ought to be…there’s something we ought to be doing,” said Famine.

“S’right. Got an appointment.”

“The—” Pestilence gazed reflectively into his drink. “Thingy.”

They stared gloomily at the bar counter. The innkeeper had long ago fled. There were several bottles still unopened.

“Okra,” said Famine, eventually. “That was it.”

“Nah.”

“The Apos…the Apostrophe,” said War, vaguely.

They shook their heads. There was a lengthy pause.

“What does ‘apocrustic’ mean?” said Pestilence, gazing intently into some inner world.

“Astringent,” said War, “I think.”

“It’s not that, then?”

“Shouldn’t think so,” said Famine, glumly.

There was another long, embarrassed silence.

“Better have ’nother drink,” said War, pulling himself together.

“S’right.”

About fifty miles away and several thousand feet up, Conina at last managed to control her stolen horse and brought it to a gentle trot on the empty air, displaying some of the most determined nonchalance the Disc had ever seen.

“Snow?” she said.

Clouds were roaring soundlessly from the direction of the Hub. They were fat and heavy and shouldn’t be moving so fast. Blizzards trailed beneath them, covering the landscape like a sheet.

It didn’t look like the kind of snow that whispers down gently in the pit of the night and in the morning turns the landscape into a glittering wonderland of uncommon and ethereal beauty. It looked like the kind of snow that intends to make the world as bloody cold as possible.

“Bit late in the year,” said Nijel. He glanced downwards, and then immediately closed his eyes.

Creosote watched in delighted astonishment. “Is that how it happens?” he said. “I’ve only heard about it in stories. I thought it sprouted out of the ground somehow. Bit like mushrooms, I thought.”

“Those clouds aren’t right,” said Conina.

“Do you mind if we go down now?” said Nijel weakly. “Somehow it didn’t look so bad when we were moving.”

Conina ignored this. “Try the lamp,” she commanded. “I want to know about this.”

Nijel fumbled in his pack and produced the lamp.

The voice of the genie sounded rather tinny and far off, and said: “If you would care to relax a little…trying to connect you.” There then followed some tinkly little music, the kind that perhaps a Swiss chalet would make if you could play it, before a trapdoor outlined itself in the air and the genie himself appeared. He looked around him, and then at them.

“Oh, wow,” he said.

“Something’s happening to the weather,” said Conina. “Why?”

“You mean you don’t know?” said the genie.

“We’re asking you, aren’t we?”

“Well, I’m no judge, but it rather looks like the Apocralypse, yuh?”

“What?”

The genie shrugged. “The gods have vanished, okay?” he said. “And according to, you know, legend, that means—”

“The Ice Giants,” said Nijel, in a horrified whisper.

“Speak up,” said Creosote.

“The Ice Giants,” Nijel repeated loudly, with a trace of irritation. “The gods keep them imprisoned, see. At the Hub. But at the end of the world they’ll break free at last, and ride out on their dreadful glaciers and regain their ancient domination, crushing out the flames of civilization until the world lies naked and frozen under the terrible cold stars until Time itself freezes over. Or something like that, apparently.”

“But it isn’t time for the Apocralypse,” said Conina desperately. “I mean, a dreadful ruler has to arise, there must be a terrible war, the four dreadful horsemen have to ride, and then the Dungeon Dimensions will break into the world—” She stopped, her face nearly as white as the snow.

“Being buried under a thousand-foot ice sheet sounds awfully like it, anyway,” said the genie. He reached forward and snatched his lamp out of Nijel’s hands.

“Mucho apologies,” he said, “but it’s time to liquidize my assets in this reality. See you around. Or something.” He vanished up to the waist, and then with a faint last cry of “Shame about lunch,” disappeared entirely.

The three riders peered through the veils of driving snow toward the Hub.

“It may be my imagination,” said Creosote, “but can either of you hear a sort of creaking and groaning?”

“Shut up,” said Conina distractedly.

Creosote leaned over and patted her hand.

“Cheer up,” he said, “it’s not the end of the world.” He thought about this statement for a bit, and then added, “Sorry. Just a figure of speech.”

“What are we going to do?” she wailed.

Nijel drew himself up.

“I think,” he said, “that we should go and explain.”

They turned toward him with the kind of expression normally reserved for messiahs or extreme idiots.

“Yes,” he said, with a shade more confidence. “We should explain.”

“Explain to the Ice Giants?” said Conina.

“Yes.”

“Sorry,” said Conina, “have I got this right? You think we should go and find the terrifying Ice Giants and sort of tell them that there are a lot of warm people out here who would rather they didn’t sweep across the world crushing everyone under mountains of ice, and could they sort of reconsider things? Is that what you think we should do?”

“Yes. That’s right. You’ve got it exactly.”

Conina and Creosote exchanged glances. Nijel remained sitting proudly in the saddle, a faint smile on his face.

“Is your geese giving you trouble?” said the Seriph.

“Geas,” said Nijel calmly. “It’s not giving me trouble, it’s just that I must do something brave before I die.”

“That’s it though,” said Creosote. “That’s the whole rather sad point. You’ll do something brave, and then you’ll die.”

“What alternative have we got?” said Nijel.

They considered this.

“I don’t think I’m much good at explaining,” said Conina, in a small voice.

“I am,” said Nijel, firmly. “I’m always having to explain.”

The scattered particles of what had been Rincewind’s mind pulled themselves together and drifted up through the layers of dark unconsciousness like a three-day corpse rising to the surface.

It probed its most recent memories, in much the same way that one might scratch a fresh scab.

He could recall something about a staff, and a pain so intense that it appeared to insert a chisel between every cell in his body and hammer on it repeatedly.

He remembered the staff fleeing, dragging him after it. And then there had been that dreadful bit where Death had appeared and reached past him, and the staff had twisted and become suddenly alive and Death had said, IPSLORE THE RED, I HAVE YOU NOW.

And now there was this.

By the feel of it Rincewind was lying on sand. It was very cold.

He took the risk of seeing something horrible and opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was his left arm and, surprisingly, his hand. It was its normal grubby self. He had expected to see a stump.

It seemed to be nighttime. The beach, or whatever it was, stretched on toward a line of distant low mountains, under night sky frosted with a million stars.

A little closer to him there was a rough line in the silvery sand. He lifted his head slightly and saw the scatter of molten droplets. They were octiron, a metal so intrinsically magical that no forge on the Disc could even warm it up.

“Oh,” he said. “We won, then.”

He flopped down again.

After a while his right hand came up automatically and patted the top of his head. Then it patted the sides of his head. Then it began to grope, with increasing urgency, in the sand around him.

Eventually it must have communicated its concern to the rest of Rincewind, because he pulled himself upright and said, “Oh, bugger.”

There seemed to be no hat anywhere. But he could see a small white shape lying very still in the sand a little way away and, further off—

A column of daylight.

It hummed and swayed in the air, a three-dimensional hole into somewhere else. Occasional flurries of snow blew out of it. He could see skewed images in the light, that might be buildings or landscapes warped by the weird curvature. But he couldn’t see them very clearly, because of the tall, brooding shadows that surrounded it.

The human mind is an astonishing thing. It can operate on several levels at once. And, in fact, while Rincewind had been wasting his intellect in groaning and looking for his hat, an inner part of his brain had been observing, assessing, analyzing and comparing.

Now it crept up to his cerebellum, tapped it on the shoulder, thrust a message into its hand and ran for it.

The message ran something like this: I hope I find me well. The last trial of magic has been too much for the tortured fabric of reality. It has opened a hole. I am in the Dungeon Dimensions. And the things in front of me are…the Things. It has been nice knowing me.

The particular thing nearest Rincewind was at least twenty feet high. It looked like a dead horse that had been dug up after three months and then introduced to a range of new experiences, at least one of which had included an octopus.

It hadn’t noticed Rincewind. It was too busy concentrating on the light.

Rincewind crawled back to the still body of Coin and nudged it gently.

“Are you alive?” he said. “If you’re not, I’d prefer it if you didn’t answer.”

Coin rolled over and stared up at him with puzzled eyes. After a while he said, “I remember—”

“Best not to,” said Rincewind.

The boy’s hand groped vaguely in the sand beside him.

“It isn’t here anymore,” said Rincewind, quietly. The hand stopped its searching.

Rincewind helped Coin to sit up. He looked blankly at the cold silver sand, then at the sky, then at the distant Things, and then at Rincewind.

“I don’t know what to do,” he said.

“No harm in that. I’ve never known what to do,” said Rincewind with hollow cheerfulness. “Been completely at a loss my whole life.” He hesitated. “I think it’s called being human, or something.”

“But I’ve always known what to do!”

Rincewind opened his mouth to say that he’d seen some of it, but changed his mind. Instead he said, “Chin up. Look on the bright side. It could be worse.”

Coin took another look around.

“In what respect, exactly?” he said, his voice a shade more normal.

“Um.”

“What is this place?”

“It’s a sort of other dimension. The magic broke through and we went with it, I think.”

“And those things?”

They regarded the Things.

“I think they’re Things. They’re trying to get back through the hole,” said Rincewind. “It isn’t easy. Energy levels, or something. I remember we had a lecture on them once. Er.”

Coin nodded, and reached out a thin pale hand toward Rincewind’s forehead.

“Do you mind—?” he began.

Rincewind shuddered at the touch. “Mind what?” he said.

—if I have a look in your head?

“Aargh.”

It’s rather a mess in here. No wonder you can’t find things.

“Ergh.”

You ought to have a clear out.

“Oogh.”

“Ah.”

Rincewind felt the presence retreat. Coin frowned.

“We can’t let them get through,” he announced. “They have horrible powers. They’re trying to will the hole bigger, and they can do it. They’ve been waiting to break into our world for—” he frowned—“ians?”

“Aeons,” said Rincewind.

Coin opened his other hand, which had been tightly clenched, and showed Rincewind the small gray pearl.

“Do you know what this is?” he said.

“No. What is it?”

“I—can’t remember. But we should put it back.”

“Okay. Just use sourcery. Blow them to bits and let’s go home.”

“No. They live on magic. It’d only make them worse. I can’t use magic.”

“Are you sure?” said Rincewind.

“I’m afraid your memory was very clear on the subject.”

“Then what shall we do?”

“I don’t know!”

Rincewind thought about this and then, with an air of finality, started to take off his last sock.

“No half-bricks,” he said, to no one in particular. “Have to use sand.”

“You’re going to attack them with a sockful of sand?”

“No. I’m going to run away from them. The sockful of sand is for when they follow.”

People were returning to Al Khali, where the ruined tower was a smoking heap of stones. A few brave souls turned their attention to the wreckage, on the basis that there might be survivors who could be rescued or looted or both.

And, among the rubble, the following conversation might have been heard:

“There’s something moving under here!”

“Under that? By the two beards of Imtal, you are mishearing. It must weigh a ton.”

“Over here, brothers!”

And then sounds of much heaving would have been heard, and then:

“It’s a box!”

“It could be treasure, do you think?”

“It’s growing legs, by the Seven Moons of Nasreem!”

“Five moons—”

“Where’d it go? Where’d it go?”

“Never mind about that, it’s not important. Let’s get this straight, according to the legend it was five moons—”

In Klatch they take their mythology seriously. It’s only real life they don’t believe.

The three horsepersons sensed the change as they descended through the heavy snowclouds at the Hub end of the Sto Plain. There was a sharp scent in the air.

“Can’t you smell it?” said Nijel, “I remember it when I was a boy, when you lay in bed on that first morning in winter, and you could sort of taste it in the air and—”

The clouds parted below them and there, filling the high plains country from end to end, were the herds of the Ice Giants.

They stretched for miles in every direction, and the thunder of their stampede filled the air.

The bull glaciers were in the lead, bellowing their vast creaky calls and throwing up great sheets of earth as they plowed relentlessly forward. Behind them pressed the great mass of cows and their calves, skimming over land already ground down to the bedrock by the leaders.

They bore as much resemblance to the familiar glaciers the world thought it knew as a lion dozing in the shade bears to three hundred pounds of wickedly coordinated muscle bounding toward you with its mouth open.

“…and…and…when you went to the window,” Nijel’s mouth, lacking any further input from his brain, ran down.

Moving, jostling ice packed the plain, roaring forward under a great cloud of clammy steam. The ground shook as the leaders passed below, and it was obvious to the onlookers that whoever was going to stop this would need more than a couple of pounds of rock salt and a shovel.

“Go on, then,” said Conina, “explain. I think you’d better shout.

Nijel looked distractedly at the herd.

“I think I can see some figures,” said Creosote helpfully. “Look, on top of the leading…things.”

Nijel peered through the snow. There were indeed beings moving around on the backs of the glaciers. They were human, or humanoid, or at least humanish. They didn’t look very big.

That turned out to be because the glaciers themselves were very big, and Nijel wasn’t very good at perspective. As the horses flew lower over the leading glacier, a huge bull heavily crevassed and scarred by moraine, it became apparent that one reason why the Ice Giants were known as the Ice Giants was because they were, well, giants.

The other was that they were made of ice.

A figure the size of a large house was crouched at the crest of the bull, urging it to greater efforts by means of a spike on a long pole. It was craggy, in fact it was more nearly faceted, and glinted green and blue in the light; there was a thin band of silver in its snowy locks, and its eyes were tiny and black and deep set, like lumps of coal.^*

There was a splintering crash ahead as the leading glaciers smacked into a forest. Birds rattled up in panic. Snow and splinters rained down around Nijel as he galloped on the air alongside the giant.

He cleared his throat.

“Erm,” he said, “excuse me?”

Ahead of the boiling surf of earth, snow and smashed timber a herd of caribou was running in blind panic, their rear hooves a few feet from the tumbling mess.

Nijel tried again.

“I say?” he shouted.

The giant’s head turned toward him.

“Vot you vant?” it said. “Go avay, hot person.”

“Sorry, but is this really necessary?”

The giant looked at him in frozen astonishment. It turned around slowly and regarded the rest of the herd, which seemed to stretch all the way to the Hub. It looked at Nijel again.

“Yarss,” it said, “I tink so. Othervise, why ve do it?”

“Only there’s a lot of people out there who would prefer you not to, you see,” said Nijel, desperately. A rock spire loomed briefly ahead of the glacier, rocked for a second and then vanished.

He added, “Also children and small furry animals.”

“They vill suffer in the cause of progress. Now is the time ve reclaim the vorld,” rumbled the giant. “Whole vorld of ice. According to inevitability of history and triumph of thermodynamics.”

“Yes, but you don’t have to,” said Nijel.

“Ve vant to,” said the giant. “The gods are gone, ve throw off shackles of outmoded superstition.”

“Freezing the whole world solid doesn’t sound very progressive to me,” said Nijel.

“Ve like it.”

“Yes, yes,” said Nijel, in the maniacally glazed tones of one who is trying to see all sides of the issue and is certain that a solution will be found if people of goodwill will only sit around a table and discuss things rationally like sensible human beings. “But is this the right time? Is the world ready for the triumph of ice?”

“It bloody vell better be,” said the giant, and swung his glacier prod at Nijel. It missed the horse but caught him full in the chest, lifting him clean out of the saddle and flicking him onto the glacier itself. He spun, spreadeagled, down its freezing flanks, was carried some way by the boil of debris, and rolled into the slush of ice and mud between the speeding walls.

He staggered to his feet, and peered hopelessly into the freezing fog. Another glacier bore down directly on him.

So did Conina. She leaned over as her horse swept down out of the fog, caught Nijel by his leather barbarian harness, and swung him up in front of her.

As they rose again he wheezed, “Cold-hearted bastard. I really thought I was getting somewhere for a moment there. You just can’t talk to some people.”

The herd breasted another hill, scraping off quite a lot of it, and the Sto Plain, studded with cities, lay helpless before it.

Rincewind sidled toward the nearest Thing, holding Coin with one hand and swinging the loaded sock in the other.

“No magic, right?” he said.

“Yes,” said the boy.

“Whatever happens, you musn’t use magic?”

“That’s it. Not here. They haven’t got much power here, if you don’t use magic. Once they break through, though…”

His voice trailed away.

“Pretty awful,” Rincewind nodded.

“Terrible,” said Coin.

Rincewind sighed. He wished he still had his hat. He’d just have to do without it.

“All right,” he said. “When I shout, you make a run for the light. Do you understand? No looking back or anything. No matter what happens.”

“No matter what?” said Coin uncertainly.

“No matter what.” Rincewind gave a brave little smile. “Especially no matter what you hear.”

He was vaguely cheered to see Coin’s mouth become an “O” of terror.

“And then,” he continued, “when you get back to the other side—”

“What shall I do?”

Rincewind hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “Anything you can. As much magic as you like. Anything. Just stop them. And…um…”

“Yes?”

Rincewind gazed up at the Thing, which was still staring into the light.

“If it…you know…if anyone gets out of this, you know, and everything is all right after all, sort of thing, I’d like you to sort of tell people I sort of stayed here. Perhaps they could sort of write it down somewhere. I mean, I wouldn’t want a statue or anything,” he added virtuously.

After a while he added, “I think you ought to blow your nose.”

Coin did so, on the hem of his robe, and then shook Rincewind’s hand solemnly.

“If ever you…” he began, “that is, you’re the first…it’s been a great…you see, I never really…” His voice trailed off, and then he said, “I just wanted you to know that.”

“There was something else I was trying to say,” said Rincewind, letting go of the hand. He looked blank for a moment, and then added, “Oh, yes. It’s vital to remember who you really are. It’s very important. It isn’t a good idea to rely on other people or things to do it for you, you see. They always get it wrong.”

“I’ll try and remember,” said Coin.

“It’s very important,” Rincewind repeated, almost to himself. “And now I think you’d better run.”

Rincewind crept closer to the Thing. This particular one had chicken legs, but most of the rest of it was mercifully hidden in what looked like folded wings.

It was, he thought, time for a few last words. What he said now was likely to be very important. Perhaps they would be words that would be remembered, and handed down, and maybe even carved deeply in slabs of granite.

Words without too many curly letters in, therefore.

“I really wish I wasn’t here,” he muttered.

He hefted the sock, whirled it once or twice, and smashed the Thing on what he hoped was its kneecap.

It gave a shrill buzz, spun wildly with its wings creaking open, lunged vaguely at Rincewind with its vulture head and got another sockful of sand on the upswing.

Rincewind looked around desperately as the Thing staggered back, and saw Coin still standing where he had left him. To his horror he saw the boy begin to walk toward him, hands raised instinctively to fire the magic which, here, would doom both of them.

“Run away, you idiot!” he screamed, as the Thing began to gather itself for a counter-attack. From out of nowhere he found the words, “You know what happens to boys who are bad!”

Coin went pale, turned and ran toward the light. He moved as though through treacle, fighting against the entropy slope. The distorted image of the world turned inside out hovered a few feet away, then inches, wavering uncertainly…

A tentacle curled around his leg, tumbling him forward.

He flung his hands out as he fell, and one of them touched snow. It was immediately grabbed by something else that felt like a warm, soft leather glove, but under the gentle touch was a grip as tough as tempered steel and it tugged him forward, also dragging whatever it was that had caught him.

Light and grainy dark flicked around him and suddenly he was sliding over cobbles slicked with ice.

The Librarian let go his hold and stood over Coin with a length of heavy wooden beam in his hand. For a moment the ape reared against the darkness, the shoulder, elbow and wrist of his right arm unfolding in a poem of applied leverage, and in a movement as unstoppable as the dawn of intelligence brought it down very heavily. There was a squashy noise and an offended screech, and the burning pressure on Coin’s leg vanished.

The dark column wavered. There were squeals and thumps coming from it, distorted by distance.

Coin struggled to his feet and started to run back into the dark, but this time the Librarian’s arm blocked his path.

“We can’t just leave him in there!”

The ape shrugged.

There was another crackle from the dark, and then a moment of almost complete silence.

But only almost complete. Both of them thought they heard, a long way off but very distinct, the sound of running feet fading into the distance.

They found an echo in the outside world. The ape glanced around, and then pushed Coin hurriedly to one side as something squat and battered and with hundreds of little legs barrelled across the stricken courtyard and, without so much as pausing in its stride, leapt into the disappearing darkness, which flickered for one last time and vanished.

There was a sudden flurry of snow across the air where it had been.

Coin wrenched free of the Librarian’s grip and ran into the circle, which was already turning white. His feet scuffed up a sprinkle of fine sand.

“He didn’t come out!” he said.

“Oook,” said the Librarian, in a philosophic manner.

“I thought he’d come out. You know, just at the last minute.”

“Oook?”

Coin looked closely at the cobbles, as if by mere concentration he could change what he saw. “Is he dead?”

“Oook,” observed the Librarian, contriving to imply that Rincewind was in a region where even things like time and space were a bit iffy, and that it was probably not very useful to speculate as to his exact state at this point in time, if indeed he was at any point in time at all, and that, all in all, he might even turn up tomorrow or, for that matter, yesterday, and finally that if there was any chance at all of surviving then Rincewind almost certainly would.

“Oh,” said Coin.

He watched the Librarian shuffle around and head back for the Tower of Art, and a desperate loneliness overcame him.

“I say!” he yelled.

“Oook?”

“What should I do now?”

“Oook?”

Coin waved vaguely at the desolation.

“You know, perhaps I could do something about all this?” he said in a voice tilting on the edge of terror. “Do you think that would be a good idea? I mean, I could help people. I’m sure you’d like to be human again, wouldn’t you?”

The Librarian’s everlasting smile hoisted itself a little further up his face, just enough to reveal his teeth.

“Okay, perhaps not,” said Coin hurriedly, “but there’s other things I could do, isn’t there?”

The Librarian gazed at him for some time, then dropped his eyes to the boy’s hand. Coin gave a guilty start, and opened his fingers.

The ape caught the little silver ball neatly before it hit the ground and held it up to one eye. He sniffed it, shook it gently, and listened to it for a while.

Then he wound up his arm and flung it away as hard as possible.

“What—” Coin began, and landed full length in the snow when the Librarian pushed him over and dived on top of him.

The ball curved over at the top of its arc and tumbled down, its perfect path interrupted suddenly by the ground. There was a sound like a harp string breaking, a brief babble of incomprehensible voices, a rush of hot wind, and the gods of the Disc were free.

The were very angry.

“There is nothing we can do, is there?” said Creosote.

“No,” said Conina.

“The ice is going to win, isn’t it?” said Creosote.

“Yes,” said Conina.

“No,” said Nijel.

He was trembling with rage, or possibly with cold, and was nearly as pale as the glaciers that rumbled past below them.

Conina sighed. “Well, just how do you think—” she began.

“Take me down somewhere a few minutes ahead of them,” said Nijel.

“I really don’t see how that would help.”

“I wasn’t asking your opinion,” said Nijel, quietly. “Just do it. Put me down a little way ahead of them so I’ve got a while to get sorted out.”

“Get what sorted out?”

Nijel didn’t answer.

“I said,” said Conina, “get what—”

“Shut up!”

“I don’t see why—”

“Look,” said Nijel, with the patience that lies just short of axe-murdering. “The ice is going to cover the whole world, right? Everyone’s going to die, okay? Except for us for a little while, I suppose, until these horses want their, their, their oats or the lavatory or whatever, which isn’t much use to us except maybe Creosote will just about have time to write a sonnet or something about how cold it is all of a sudden, and the whole of human history is about to be scraped up and in these circumstances I would like very much to make it completely clear that I am not about to be argued with, is that absolutely understood?”

He paused for breath, trembling like a harpstring.

Conina hesitated. Her mouth opened and shut a few times, as though she was considering arguing, and then she thought better of it.

They found a small clearing in a pine forest a mile or two ahead of the herd, although the sound of it was clearly audible and there was a line of steam above the trees and the ground was dancing like a drumtop.

Nijel strolled to the middle of the clearing and made a few practice swings with his sword. The others watched him thoughtfully.

“If you don’t mind,” whispered Creosote to Conina, “I’ll be off. It’s at times like this that sobriety loses its attractions and I’m sure the end of the world will look a lot better through the bottom of a glass, if it’s all the same to you. Do you believe in Paradise, o peach-cheeked blossom?”

“Not as such, no.”

“Oh,” said Creosote. “Well, in that case we probably won’t be seeing each other again.” He sighed. “What a waste. All this was just because of a geas. Um. Of course, if by some unthinkable chance—”

“Goodbye,” said Conina.

Creosote nodded miserably, wheeled the horse and disappeared over the treetops.

Snow was shaking down from the branches around the clearing. The thunder of the approaching glaciers filled the air.

Nijel started when she tapped him on the shoulder, and dropped his sword.

“What are you doing here?” he snapped, fumbling desperately in the snow.

“Look, I’m not prying or anything,” said Conina meekly, “but what exactly do you have in mind?”

She could see a rolling heap of bulldozed snow and soil bearing down on them through the forest, the mind-numbing sound of the leading glaciers now overlaid with the rhythmic snapping of tree trunks. And, advancing implacably above the treeline, so high that the eye mistook them at first for sky, the blue-green prows.

“Nothing,” said Nijel, “nothing at all. We’ve just got to resist them, that’s all there is to it. That’s what we’re here for.”

“But it won’t make any difference,” she said.

“It will to me. If we’re going to die anyway, I’d rather die like this. Heroically.”

“Is it heroic to die like this?” said Conina.

“I think it is,” he said, “and when it comes to dying, there’s only one opinion that matters.”

“Oh.”

A couple of deer blundered into the clearing, ignored the humans in their blind panic, and rocketed away.

“You don’t have to stay,” said Nijel. “I’ve got this geas, you see.”

Conina looked at the backs of her hands.

“I think I should,” she said, and added, “You know, I thought maybe, you know, if we could just get to know one another better—”

“Mr. and Mrs. Harebut, was that what you had in mind?” he said bluntly.

Her eyes widened. “Well—” she began.

“Which one did you intend to be?” he said.

The leading glacier smashed into the clearing just behind its bow wave, its top lost in a cloud of its own creation.

At exactly the same time the trees opposite it bent low as a hot wind blew from the Rim. It was loaded with voices—petulant, bickering voices—and tore into the clouds like a hot iron into water.

Conina and Nijel threw themselves down into snow which turned to warm slush under them. Something like a thunderstorm crashed overhead, filled with shouting and what they at first thought were screams although, thinking about them later, they seemed more like angry arguments. It went on for a long time, and then began to fade in the direction of the Hub.

Warm water flooded down the front of Nijel’s vest. He lifted himself cautiously, and then nudged Conina.

Together they scrambled through the slush and mud to the top of the slope, climbed through a logjam of smashed timber and boulders, and stared at the scene.

The glaciers were retreating, under a cloud stuffed with lightning. Behind them the landscape was a network of lakes and pools.

“Did we do that?” said Conina.

“It would be nice to think so, wouldn’t it?” said Nijel.

“Yes, but did—” she began.

“Probably not. Who knows? Let’s just find a horse,” he said.

“The Apogee,” said War, “or something. I’m pretty sure.”

They had staggered out of the inn and were sitting on a bench in the afternoon sunshine. Even War had been persuaded to take off some of his armor.

“Dunno,” said Famine, “Don’t think so.”

Pestilence shut his crusted eyes and leaned back against the warm stones.

“I think,” he said, “it was something about the end of the world.”

War sat and thoughtfully scratched his chin. He hiccuped.

“What, the whole world?” he said.

“I reckon.”

War gave this some further consideration. “I reckon we’re well out of it, then,” he said.

People were returning to Ankh-Morpork, which was no longer a city of empty marble but was once again its old self, sprawling as randomly and colorfully as a pool of vomit outside the all-night takeaway of History.

And the University had been rebuilt, or had rebuilt itself, or in some strange way had never been unbuilt; every strand of ivy, every rotting casement, was back in place. The sourcerer had offered to replace everything as good as new, all wood sparkling, all stone unstained, but the Librarian had been very firm on the subject. He wanted everything replaced as good as old.

The wizards came creeping back with the dawn, in ones or twos, scuttling for their old rooms, trying to avoid one another’s gaze, trying to remember a recent past that was already becoming unreal and dream-like.

Conina and Nijel arrived around breakfast time and, out of kindness, found a livery stable for War’s horse.^* It was Conina who insisted that they look for Rincewind at the University, and who, therefore, first saw the books.

They were flying out of the Tower of Art, spiraling around the University buildings and swooping through the door of the reincarnated Library. One or two of the more impudent grimoires were chasing sparrows, or hovering hawk-like over the quad.

The Librarian was leaning against the doorway, watching his charges with a benevolent eye. He waggled his eyebrows at Conina, the nearest he ever got to a conventional greeting.

“Is Rincewind here?” she said.

“Oook.”

“Sorry?”

The ape didn’t answer but took them both by the hand and, walking between them like a sack between two poles, led them across the cobbles to the tower.

There were a few candles alight inside, and they saw Coin seated on a stool. The Librarian bowed them into his presence like an ancient retainer in the oldest family of all, and withdrew.

Coin nodded at them. “He knows when people don’t understand him,” he said. “Remarkable, isn’t he?”

“Who are you?” said Conina.

“Coin,” said Coin.

“Are you a student here?”

“I’m learning quite a lot, I think.”

Nijel was wandering around the walls, giving them the occasional prod. There had to be some good reason why they didn’t fall down, but if there was it didn’t lie in the realms of civil engineering.

“Are you looking for Rincewind?” said Coin.

Conina frowned. “How did you guess that?”

“He told me some people would come looking for him.”

Conina relaxed. “Sorry,” she said, “we’ve had a bit of a trying time. I thought perhaps it was magic, or something. He’s all right, isn’t he? I mean, what’s been happening? Did he fight the sourcerer?”

“Oh, yes. And he won. It was very…interesting. I saw it all. But then he had to go,” said Coin, as though reciting.

“What, just like that?” said Nijel.

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Conina. She was beginning to crouch, her knuckles whitening.

“It is true,” said Coin. “Everything I say is true. It has to be.”

“I want to—” Conina began, and Coin stood up, extended a hand and said, “Stop.”

She froze. Nijel stiffened in mid-frown.

“You will leave,” said Coin, in a pleasant, level voice, “and you will ask no more questions. You will be totally satisfied. You have all your answers. You will live happily ever after. You will forget hearing these words. You will go now.”

They turned slowly and woodenly, like puppets, and trooped to the door. The Librarian opened it for them, ushered them through and shut it behind them.

Then he stared at Coin, who sagged back onto the stool.

“All right, all right,” said the boy, “but it was only a little magic. I had to. You said yourself people had to forget.”

“Oook?”

“I can’t help it! It’s too easy to change things!” He clutched his head. “I’ve only got to think of something! I can’t stay, everything I touch goes wrong, it’s like trying to sleep on a heap of eggs! This world is too thin! Please tell me what to do!”

The Librarian spun around on his bottom a few times, a sure sign of deep thought.

Exactly what he said is not recorded, but Coin smiled, nodded, shook the Librarian’s hand, and opened his own hands and drew them up and around him and stepped into another world. It had a lake in, and some distant mountains, and a few pheasants watching him suspiciously from under the trees. It was the magic all sourcerers learned, eventually.

Sourcerers never become part of the world. They merely wear it for a while.

He looked back, halfway across the turf, and waved at the Librarian. The ape gave him an encouraging nod.

And then the bubble shrank inside itself, and the last sourcerer vanished from this world and into a world of his own.

Although it has nothing much to do with the story, it is an interesting fact that, about five hundred miles away, a small flock, or rather in this case a herd, of birds were picking their way cautiously through the trees. They had heads like a flamingo, bodies like a turkey, and legs like a Sumo wrestler; they walked in a jerky, bobbing fashion, as though their heads were attached to their feet by elastic bands. They belonged to a species unique even among Disc fauna, in that their prime means of defense was to cause a predator to laugh so much that they could run away before it recovered.

Rincewind would have been vaguely satisfied to know that they were geas.

Custom was slow in the Mended Drum. The troll chained to the doorpost sat in the shade and reflectively picked someone out of his teeth.

Creosote was singing softly to himself. He had discovered been and wasn’t having to pay for it, because the coinage of compliments—rarely employed by the swains of Ankh—was having an astonishing effect on the landlord’s daughter. She was a large, good-natured girl, with a figure that was the color and, not to put too fine a point on it, the same shape as unbaked bread. She was intrigued. No one had ever referred to her breasts as jewelled melons before.

“Absolutely,” said the Seriph, sliding peacefully off his bench, “no doubt about it.” Either the big yellow sort or the small green ones with huge warty veins, he told himself virtuously.

“And what was that about my hair?” she said encouragingly, hauling him back and refiling his glass.

“Oh.” The Seriph’s brow wrinkled. “Like a goat of flocks that grazes on the slopes of Mount Wossname, and no mistake. And as for your ears,” he added quickly, “no pink-hued shells that grace the sea-kissed sands of—”

“Exactly how like a flock of goats?” she said.

The Seriph hesitated. He’d always considered it one of his best lines. Now it was meeting Ankh-Morpork’s famous literal-mindedness head-on for the first time. Strangely enough, he felt rather impressed.

“I mean, in size, shape or smell?” she went on.

“I think,” said the Seriph, “that perhaps the phrase I had in mind was exactly not like a flog of gits.”

“Ah?” The girl pulled the flagon toward her.

“And I think perhaps I would like another drink,” he said indistinctly, “and then—and then—” He looked sideways at the girl, and took the plunge. “Are you much of a raconteur?”

“What?”

He licked his suddenly dry lips. “I mean, do you know many stories?” he croaked.

“Oh, yes. Lots.”

“Lots?” whispered Creosote. Most of his concubines only knew the same old one or two.

“Hundreds. Why, do you want to hear one?”

“What, now?”

“If you like. It’s not very busy in here.”

Perhaps I did die, Creosote thought. Perhaps this is Paradise. He took her hands. “You know,” he said, “it’s ages since I’ve had a good narrative. But I wouldn’t want you to do anything you don’t want to.”

She patted his arm. What a nice old gentleman, she thought. Compared to some we get in here.

“There’s one my granny used to tell me. I know it backwards,” she said.

Creosote sipped his beer and watched the wall in a warm glow. Hundreds, he thought. And she knows some of them backwards.

She cleared her throat, and said, in a sing-song voice that made Creosote’s pulse fuse. “There was a man and he had eight sons—”

The Patrician sat by his window, writing. His mind was full of fluff as far as the last week or two was concerned, and he didn’t like that much.

A servant had lit a lamp to dispel the twilight, and a few early evening moths were orbiting it. The Patrician watched them carefully. For some reason he felt very uneasy in the presence of glass but that, as he stared fixedly at the insects, wasn’t what bothered him most.

What bothered him was that he was fighting a terrible urge to catch them with his tongue.

And Wuffles lay on his back at his master’s feet, and barked in his dreams.

Lights were going on all over the city, but the last few strands of sunset illuminated the gargoyles as they helped one another up the long climb to the roof.

The Librarian watched them from the open door, while giving himself a philosophic scratch. Then he turned and shut out the night.

It was warm in the Library. It was always warm in the Library, because the scatter of magic that produced the glow also gently cooked the air.

The Librarian looked at his charges approvingly, made his last rounds of the slumbering shelves, and then dragged his blanket underneath his desk, ate a goodnight banana, and fell asleep.

Silence gradually reclaimed the Library. Silence drifted around the remains of a hat, heavily battered and frayed and charred around the edges, that had been placed with some ceremony in a niche in the wall. No matter how far a wizard goes, he will always come back for his hat.

Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disk like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve.

But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning.