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

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

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

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

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

“I mean, he even laughed!”

“Ah. A sense of humor, too.”

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

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

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

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

“That’s ridiculous!”

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

“What?”

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

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

“Stop wearing the robe?” he said.

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

“Get rid of the hat?”

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

Rincewind gave him a worried grin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You can just stop being a wizard.”

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

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

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

Rincewind nodded gloomily.

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

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

He stopped and stared at the hat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who?”

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where?” said Rincewind.

“Anywhere!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right.”

He wandered back again and told Rincewind.

“Yes, but did you torture him?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

Without hesitation, Rincewind took a step backwards.

“Over to you, friend,” he said.

“Right!”

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

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

“Erm,” he said, “excuse me…”

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well, then.”

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

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

“Hippopotamus?”

“Alligator?”

“Ocean?”

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

He pulled himself together a bit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stretched out his arms.

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

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

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

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

Sconner blinked.

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“All right, what did you see?”

“Well, I’m not exactly—”

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

“I saw someth—”

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

“It was—”

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

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

“Er, Sconner—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who’s that?”

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

“Oh. Sorry, Sconner.”

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

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

“Get him, lads!”

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

“Sorry, but—”

“—you know that if you use—”

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

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

“BANG! Goodnight, world!”

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

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

They risked it. Sconner stood up.

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

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

He wilted under the stare.

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

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

“Shut up.”

“Yes, Sconner.”

“You ghastly little man,” said Sconner.

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

“No, Sconner,” they chorused.

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

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

 

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

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

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

The guards stared through him.

“Erm,” he said.

“Okay,” he said.

He sidled back to Nijel.

“Are you any good with that sword?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Seven days?”

“Well, I’m a slow reader.”

“Ah,” said Rincewind.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I should think not.”

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

Nijel looked upwards.

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

“Search me.”

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

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

“Thank you.”

“—I’ll do it for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

He realized he was talking to himself.

Nijel let go of the sword.

Conina stepped forward.

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

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

“—the Destroyer—” said Nijel dreamily.

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

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

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

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

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

They didn’t take any notice.

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

“Good idea,” murmured Conina.

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

“Jolly good,” said Nijel.

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

“Fine, fine,” said Conina.

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

Conina blinked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes, well—”

“He’s looking at us!”

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

“Suppose he talks to me!”

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

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

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

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

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

“Er.”

“Are you all right?”

“Fine, fine,” Rincewind muttered.

“Your face has gone all shiny.”

“No, I’m fine, fine.”

“He asked me to tell him a story.”

“What about?” said Rincewind suspiciously.

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

“Ah. Rabbits.”

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

“Not many rabbits?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nijel’s eyes gleamed.

“You mean a geas?” he said.

“Pardon?”

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

The ripples converged.

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That you can’t spell?” said Nijel.

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

“Yes, but—” Conina began.

“Yes?”

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

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

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

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

There was a pause full of philosophy.

“Rincewind?” said Conina, kindly.

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

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

“You will all stand very still.”

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It did something incredibly unwise.

It blinked.

 

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

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

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

“Eh?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Did you have anywhere in mind?”

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

“Why?” said Nijel.

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

All-out. Thaumaturgical. War.

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

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

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

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

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

 

“What happened, then?” said Conina.

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

“Death walks abroad,” added Nijel helpfully.

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

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

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

“It’s only a metaphor,” said Conina.

“That’s all you know. I’ve met him.”

“What did he look like?” said Nijel.

“Put it like this—”

“Yes?”

“He didn’t need a hairdresser.”

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

“What, until lunchtime?” said Rincewind weakly.

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

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

“Where to?”

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

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

“He had you thrown in a snake pit!”

“Perhaps I should have taken the hint.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abrim folded his arms.

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

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

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

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

“I can use sourcery,” said Abrim.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Never!” he said.

“Die,” suggested Abrim.

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

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

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

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

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

“So perish all enemies,” said Abrim.

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

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

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

“I embody the Lore.”

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

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

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

All three landed in the rubble and lay there panting.

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

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

“What’s going on?” said Conina.

“Magical war,” said Rincewind.

“Is that good?”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was asking you.”

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

“Phooey?”

“Right.”

“Shall we run away again?”

“It’s worth a try.”

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

“We need a plan,” said Nijel.

“We could try running again,” said Rincewind.

“That doesn’t solve anything!”

“Solves most things,” said Rincewind.

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

Rincewind risked a look around the wall.

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

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

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

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

“Phooey?” suggested Nijel.

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

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

Rincewind glanced at it. He screwed up his eyes.

“What, apart from the legs?” he said.

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

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

“It did,” said Rincewind.

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

“I say—” Nijel began.

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

“Look here—”

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

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

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

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

Creosote swayed in his direction.

“Hmm?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a geas,” muttered Rincewind.

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

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

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

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

Creosote patted him on the arm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Creosote took another sorrowful glance at his empty wine bottle.

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

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

“It belonged to my grandfather—”

“A real magic carpet?” said Nijel.

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

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

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

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

Rincewind tried to scream through gritted teeth.

His ankles were already beginning to sweat.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Conina reached down and picked up a small copper coin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Will I need training?”

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

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

“Yes,” said Conina, “the carpet.”

Creosote gave them a benevolent, slightly tipsy smile.

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

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

Nothing happened. Secret compartments assiduously failed to open.

“Um. Try the left hand.”

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

“Maybe it was the right hand…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It says, Kick Me,” said Conina.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Pardon?”

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

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

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

He could hear her rooting around above the door.

“I thought so,” she said.

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

“No.”

“Spiked grill ready to skewer—?”

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

“What, of scalding, poisonous—?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Laugh This One Off, he said,

He sat back.

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

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

Nijel emerged from the clouds, coughing.

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

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

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

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

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

“What on earth are they?” said Nijel.

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

“Gosh.”

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

“Parsnip?” said Nijel.

“Wine bottle?” said the Seriph.

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

“Not like that?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How does it work?” he said.

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

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

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

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

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

“‘Plummet,’” suggested Conina gloomily.

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

“Ah—” said Rincewind, and, “Well—”

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

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

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

They held on a minute.

They held on for a further seventeen seconds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shh!” said Conina.

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But you’ve—”

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

“Carpet—rise,” she commanded.

There was a pause.

“Up.”

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

“Lift. Levitate. Fly.”

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

“Shut. Up.”

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

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

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

“Take off, you blasted mat! Arrgh!”

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

“Why doesn’t it work?” she said.

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

“It doesn’t understand the language?”

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

“Well?”

“Well what?” sniffed Rincewind.

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

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

“Make it fly!”

Rincewind pulled his hat further over his ears.

“Please?” said Conina.

The hat rose a bit.

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

“Hear, hear,” said Creosote.

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

“Yes!”

Rincewind cleared his throat.

“Down,” he commanded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Frogs.”

“Stones.”

“Unsuccessful gangsters.”

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

“It’s very big,” said Nijel.

Rincewind nodded glumly.

“Where are we going?” said Conina.

Rincewind shrugged.

“Away,” he said.

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

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

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

“You’ve lost me there,” she admitted.

“You want it in non-wizard talk?”

“Yes.”

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

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

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

“You do it very well,” she said.

“Thank you.”

“You said you were frightened of heights.”

“Terrified.”

“You don’t show it.”

“I’m not thinking about it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twen—

“Surely there’s—” Conina began.

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

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

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

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

Conina prodded Rincewind gently in the ribs.

“Are you steering this thing?” she said.

“No.”

“Then where is it going?”

Nijel peered downwards.

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

“Someone must be guiding it.”

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

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

I’m feeling really bad.

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

Yes, but you could do something about it.

Like what?

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

I wouldn’t stand a chance.

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

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

“What?” said Conina.

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

“What are you talking about?”

“Oh. Sorry. Talking to myself.”

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

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

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

Even so, Nijel insisted that they light a fire.

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

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

“In that?” she said.

“You never can tell.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Warrizit?”

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

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

“Never mind about that. Come on.”

Creosote squinted around the impromptu campsite.

“Where’s the wizard fellow?”

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

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

Eventually Nijel said, “Why dangerous—”

“Shh! Did you hear it?”

Nijel listened.

“Like a sort of ringing noise?”

“Watch…”

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

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

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

The three of them crouched down and watched him.

“Is he asleep?” said Creosote.

Conina nodded.

“What’s he trying to do?”

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

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

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

“It is very sad,” said Creosote.

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

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

They tried to make themselves comfortable on the chilly sand.

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

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

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

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

Creosote cleared his throat.

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

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

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

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

“Pretty apt.”

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

“Did you see that?” he demanded.

“What?”

“It was a sort of flash, a kind of—”

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

After a while there was a distant rumble.

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

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

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

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

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

He opened his eyes.

“Where am I?” he said.

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

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

“What’s been happening?” he said.

“Some sort of magical fireworks.”

“Oh. It’s started, then.”

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

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

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

Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.

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

“Hmm?” said Rincewind.

“That!”

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

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

“It probably was.”

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

“Sorry.”

“But there were people in the city!”

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

“Good.”

“Whatever they are.”

“What?”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, I think—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s gone!”

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

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

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

 

The Luggage was having problems of its own.

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

Here is what it looked like.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was another series of thumps on the woodwork.

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

This time the banging rattled the hinges.

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

“Good man.”

“Ah. Oh. Right.”

He set off slowly down the short, arched passage.

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

“First class.”

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

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

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

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

There was a noise behind him. He turned around.

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

 

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

This happens to everyone sooner or later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By then, he’d probably fight himself.

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

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

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

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

Except that wizards can never go home.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Towards where the Library had been.

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

Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.

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

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

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

Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.

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

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

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

Then he ate it.

 

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

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

“But he may do something stupid!”

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

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

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

“Shut up.”

The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nijel sighed, and reached into his bag.

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

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

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

Creosote shook his head.

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

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

“You tried it?”

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

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

“I wouldn’t,” warned Creosote.

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

He rubbed it.

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

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

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

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

Conina recovered first.

“It’s a beach,” she said.

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

“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.