#anything that can go wrong will go wrong and it will happen to rincewind

[song-of-the-rune]

Also my fiance asking if their trap caught any thieves and getting a little cameo from a red-robed wizard who claimed he just tripped and stumbled into it and them only to find that he did in fact trip and stumble into it. He seems to have bad luck all around. So they patch him up and send him on his merry way and one of the players jokes about opening up the trunk he has to see what's inside and my fiance just goes "that's pearwood, right?" and I nod and he says something to the effect of "we should get very far away from this man before something else bad happens around him."

[theadventurerslog]

Discworld | Part 7

Part 7 and onward in my longest game here yet. In which I get that last artifact and finally make it to Act III and beyond!

But first that artifact. I knew the Fool had it, but I wasn't sure what it actually was. I assumed it might be his Chucky staff or something inside it. No, it turned out to be his hat with golden bells. I got a bit irked because for all five of the other people their artifact could be examined and was treated as an interactable. The hat? Absolutely nothing. I knew it thanks to a hint. I get you're supposed to know by the gold, but it broke the pattern already set by five, five! other artifacts!

Anyway, once over that hurdle and after a bit of a break from the game, I figured I'd need him to get to the bath in the bathroom to put his hat on the hat stand in the bathroom. Which, by the way, that room's music is obnoxiously louder than everywhere else for some reason. Everything about this Fool was out to get me.

I dumped the garbage can over his head. That'd get him dirty and smelly all right.

He fled to the bathroom and I followed to find him in the tub, thankfully curtained off, his hat on the hat stand as hoped, and his staff guarding the way.

Freaking Chucky.

But easily handled by adding the bubble bath and blinding Chucky with all the bubbles and foam.

I grabbed the hat and got out of there.

All six artifacts acquired!

I'd already dropped off the previous five with the dragon, so it was time to bring the last one at last.

I said something along the lines of nothing could possibly go wrong in bringing all the artifacts to the dragon. Perfectly safe thing to do.

With the last one given, he was free! ...To start enacting revenge on the world, the brotherhood, and oops, lastly Rincewind too because he had been at the ritual. Who'dathunk.

Rincewind skedaddled but now we had a new problem. Stop this dragon from coming for him later and I guess everyone else, too. After some initial what nowing it came down to having to stop the ritual from having happened the previous night.

But first I wandered and went back to the palace and discovered Nanny Ogg was gone now, so I guessed she got her seller's permit and sure enough she'd moved to the Square. She was selling a magic carpet and in her stall was her custard recipe book which she was not willing to sell.

I got the magic carpet and carried on...

Okay, so for this particular session I was already feeling kind of irritable and impatient, so while I still didn't succumb to a guide, I did go inch my way a little bit into what Universal Hint System had to say.

The ritual needed to be stopped which meant going back to that night. You can take the dragon summoning book that the thief steals, but that doesn't do anything. In fact the ritual still takes place exactly the same as always -- which does beg the question of what the book is actually doing here. Anyway, instead of just taking the book you need to replace it with something else for the thief to take. I used UHS as far as needing to get the thief to take something. Once I was on the right path it was a matter of 'okay, clearly need a different book'. And the only book I knew of was that custard book, so back I went.

I went through Nanny Ogg's conversation options again and in one of them, she gets flirty and tries a kiss pose which leaves her distracted enough to whisk away the book. So that turned out to be easy.

The book on its own isn't enough though. You gotta use them together to swap the covers, then put the newly decorated custard book in the shelf for the thief to steal, and then it's back to the hideout where Rincewind stayed outside this time to eavesdrop.

The ritual started out the same as usual but once it was time to use the book, it became custard time.

Too much oozy love custard leaking out the door... ick.

With the brotherhood otherwise engaged and the dragon not summoned, Rincewind raced back to the castle feeling quite the hero.

Which no one believed because the dragon didn't get summoned this time and dragons don't exist.

Rincewind kept insisting on the dragon being real and then... well they're summoned by belief, so...

In came the dragon with some new decorating techniques, adding a nice big hole to the castle. Despite the fiddling with time, the dragon still seemed to recognize Rincewind? So, maybe it sort of sits outside time? I dunno.

But that brought me to Act III at last!

So, Rincewind got out of there, as a Rincewind do, but now there's a dragon in the palace. Now there needs to be a hero, and I guess it was time to step up to the plate...?

It seemed like a full round was needed again for changes. I went to the city gate first and chatted with the guards. For a chance to defeat the dragon the odds have got to be a million to one because "It's a million to one chance but it might just work." And statements like that can't fail in a narrative.

This conversation brought up a little window to try different things on Rincewind to change or check the odds.

For now at least I only had the options of a tattoo, mask and magic book. Any combination of them wasn't getting the odds where I needed them. So it was time to start exploring and finding out what makes a hero.

Square: I next went to the square where I discovered that the old man who hadn't been doing so well, is in fact... not.

He's a gravestone now. Oh dear, oh dear.

Turns out he was still getting some comments from... down there? And the others seem to think he's still faking, so I dunno with these guys.

They continued to be not particularly helpful though did wind their way to talking about the traditional sacrifice of a virgin bound to a rock for the dragon.

Dibbler: now selling a leech weight loss program. After some arguing back and forth I got a paper bag of leeches. Examining the bag in the inventory took out the leeches. Two items in one!

Amazon Woman: Rincewind started to tentatively broach the subject of virgins and rocks but turns out she's not anymore. Someone bested her...at tiddly-winks.

Stall: Like the tomatoes, when I took one, the poor mouse went by now on a crutch and the egg dropped and broke over it... unleashing a snake?? I got the snake anyway. And I took another egg that I got to keep.

Psychia-trickerist: Not anymore! It's a casting office for the "Clickies". Film is starting to take off!

The troll is going by "Flint" now and reckons a hero should have a black mustache. He's got a lichen one going himself.

The girl is all into being a star now and was willing to give me her "ottograph" named after her agent, Otto, if I could bring her some nice paper.

Dunnyking: Also not the Dunnyking anymore, but now the custard king. The custard just never ends.

That was the Square done for now, so I headed to the alley next.

Rooftops: I got another scene of an assassin training on the rooftops. There's a replacement ladder but when I went up I couldn't take it. It can be interacted with though... Something for later.

Alchemist's home: He's figured out banged grains (popcorn)--gotta have the appropriate snacks for movies, but he's been purchasing expensive premium grain. Rincewind suggested he get some at the livery stable instead for a lot cheaper, so he took off leaving me free to steal the camera box, or 'impstamatic'.

Moving on...

Livery Stable: Corn's gone and the donkey is still under the weather. But I could examine the bumper of the cart where there two stickers or plates: one for Sybil Ramkin's Dragon Sanctuary which opened a new location! Yay! And one too muddy to read.

From there I went to check the barn.

Barn: I guess the dragon didn't stay in the palace because he was back there. Otherwise nothing to do that I found.

Palace: The guards were back. I got through them with the ink blot again, more wife insulting sigh.

I was assaulted by noise on entering because there is now a smoke device where the dragon had landed before.

It's loud...

Now the line to see the Patrician had the University chef, the little guy who got beat up at the Broken Drum, and still the peasant

The bathroom was unchanged and in fact the bubble bath was still bubbling

In the area with the smoke device I was able to now enter the dungeons. Here I found a couple people in cells to chat with--a thief doing time ahead of time to get it done now with the efficiency only the Patrician can bring, and the guy I got the golden banana from who was arrested for having all the gold in the kingdom, oops...

There was a mousehole with eyes peering out, and an iron maiden. Just things to keep in mind.

And I found the torture room with the Fool and the torturer who had been the tax collector but got promoted. They're the same department.

Not much but annoyance from the Fool.

I got a bone from the skeleton and then left for now.

Unseen University:

Library: Mostly unchanged but the door to L-Space is closed now

Kitchen: Got a spatula

Dining Hall: Learned from the Lecturer of Recent Runes that a Hero should have a magic talisman

Archchancellor's Office: I got his hat! It was just sitting on his desk. And when I examined his hat a bunny and handkerchiefs poked out: a seemingly endless string of them in there.

Broken Drum: Also mostly unchanged. However, there was a drink on the shelf - Klatchian cactus juice with a worm wriggling inside, that once I examined, I was able to order. That got me the worm that seems drunk. Happy, but drunk.

I still have several places just within in the city let alone outside it to check out, so the exploration and item gathering will continue next time.

[beboped1]

Color of Magic & The Light Fantastic

Decided on a whim to do a full read through of the Discworld novels, in publication order, since there’s several I’ve never read and many more I haven’t read in a decade or more. After finishing the first two, I have thoughts without an outlet, so, guess I’ll actually try using this Tumblr thing? We’ll see how long it lasts.

I’m combining the first two books because 1) I didn’t have this idea until after finishing The Light Fantastic, and 2) they are direct sequels, and in many ways Color of Magic doesn’t feel like it stands alone.

Color of Magic

First Read Through: High School

Verdict then: This has nothing that I love about the series, and early versions of characters like Death are almost offensively different than who they become.

Verdict now: There are glimmers of who he will become as a writer, but it’s missing elements key to why I love the series. Not a good starter book anymore, mostly interesting for superfans.

Color of Magic is a collection of several short stories rather than a novel proper. The four stories have the same main characters, and happen chronologically, but they don’t hang together as a single narrative well. The stories definitely get better as they go on - already, you can see Pratchett’s dedication to improving his craft, his willingness to play in different genres, and flashes of the humor that will come to define his work. You can see the seeds of what will eventually become an incisive and deeply humanitarian ethos, but just seeds.

The stories themselves mostly fell flat for me. Part of this is that they’re mostly genre parodies of genres I’m not super familiar with or a particular fan of - 60s-80s adventure fantasy, the same stuff that inspired so much of early D&D. There’s a couple references to Jack Vance & Anne McCaffrey I picked up, but I’m sure there’s more I don’t have context to pick up. The references I did get - A dragonrider character named Liessa for one - were extremely transparent, and not particularly effective as they didn’t seem to be saying anything deeper than “Hey, this is pretty silly, isn’t it?”.

The big gap here is the characters - Rincewind is a transparent author/reader insert, Twoflower is mostly a mean stereotype, Luggage isn’t a character yet, and all the side characters are one note. The first character who actually felt the least bit interesting was the water troll in the last story. The essential focus on the humanity of characters is missing.

Also, only one footnote - and a few paragraphs that felt like they should have been footnotes.

The last story was the best, and the only one that drew a chuckle out of me. The action is tighter and better plotted, there’s actual social commentary, the characters feel less one note, and it ends on a fantastic cliffhanger.

The Light Fantastic

First Read Through: Read about 3 pages in High School

Verdict then: This seems excessively silly, and I still have a bad taste in my mouth after Color of Magic, so pass

Verdict now: This is the introduction to the series Color of Magic isn’t. Still too much direct parody/references, but great action, focus on social commentary, and some actual character development.

The Light Fantastic is a full novel, a direct sequel to the stories in Color of Magic, focused on the same two/three main characters (Rincewind, Twoflower, and the Luggage). My high school self wasn’t wrong - it’s definitely one of the more slap-sticky books he has, but unlike back then, the slapstick lands for me now. I found myself regularly grinning and even chuckling in a couple places. The most important pieces that are present here that were absent in Color of Magic are the social commentary, and the core humanity of the characters.

Everyone feels more real - Rincewind isn’t just scared all the time, and has actually developed some affection for Twoflower he acts on, Twoflower has actual agency & his perspective isn’t played only for laughs, Cohen is a thoughtful examination of the adventure hero trope, rather than just a “haha, isn’t Conan a silly character”, and Bethany, while not a complete trope departure, is given actual character moments. Henerra gets an honorable mention too, for the withering takedown of female adventure hero tropes. Even Luggage is imbued with a humanity, enough so the handoff moment at the end landed well to me. Great villain too - and Trymon’s essential villainy is the denial of the humanity of others, which is center square on the Pratchett bingo card.

It’s definitely still got issues - it doesn’t have the tightness or mastery of craft that he’ll demonstrate later in his career. There’s a few lines that rang wrong, some mean similes that felt jarring. The end felt rushed, and not all of those moments felt earned; as much as I loved Twoflower’s climax, it could have been developed much better. I wanted more of Bethany’s growth to happen onscreen too. But it feels like a real entry in the series, and so is a worthy starter book.

There’s more than one footnote too!

[deathsmallcaps]

@boopboopboopbadoop Ok I borrowed this off the internet

One of the great things about TErry Pratchett (Pterry) is that he explicitly didn’t care if you pirated his book. He believed it was wrong for you to do it for other authors, but by the time the internet became big, he was the kind of author that, anything he wrote, would be published. So, if you can’t find any of his books in your local library system, then you can pirate them. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to find any online versions of the Science of Discworld books.

But anyways! As you can see, the Science of Discworld books are in Red, and there is … long list of books you ‘ought’ to read beforehand. And I kind of agree with it? But one of the nice things about Discworld books is that they’re framed with enough starter information throughout the whole story, as well as a very welcoming vibe, that you can jump right in and still understand a decent amount of information.

So if you just had time to read 1 novel before starting the SoD books, I understand. School is busy AND you have a very cool job, music, plus a bunch of friends and a boyfriend. I didn’t read the books in order either, I just read the ones I could get my physical hands on first, then the illegal audiobooks on YouTube (the book Pyramids is still there! It’s fun and it’s a starter book)*, and then I discovered the wonderful world of pirating online books.

1 novel method: The Last Continent (TLC) is a good one to do it with. The Rincewind Chronicles are good, definitely, but in comparison to Pterry’s later books, they don’t shine as much. However, TLC is a later book, and it’s pretty funny and thoughtful, so it’s a nice one to jump in. I can answer any questions you have and/or write a short explanation of what went on before it.

3 novel method: Moving Pictures, Interesting Times, then TLC would probably work. The first two are, again, some of his more early works, but you’d get a pretty good idea of what’s going on and they’re funny. You would still need some intro info though, because Interesting Times is pretty involved with the first two Rincewind books (you COULD watch the movie for those two, but it’s not good.) I would also suggest reading Troll Bridge before Interesting Times, because it’s a bit of a character study of one of the important characters. You can actually listen to a legal reading of it by Levar Burton (I love him)**.

Fun and crazy method: if you only have time for a (long) Christmassy movie in Springtime (lol), watch Hogfather***. It showcases the science of belief, the wizards and the new wizards (stodgy old Professor types, academics with their heads up in the sky and no worries for money vs. No sleep Grad students), a damn good storyline and some killer quotes. It changes very few things from the novel and won’t need a ton of explanation to basically get. You can also watch the Going Postal movie, it’s fun and well done but less related.

Sensible direction: Read the Rincewind chronicles. Rincewind is a man where things happen to him, he doesn’t do anything. But it’s written funny I swear. He’s hapless. Just keep in mind it was written in 1983 and the author was much younger and less far-thinking, so a couple things haven’t aged perfectly.

For example, he shows feminism by having a barely clothed warrior woman who is sex positive in the first (maybe second?) book. Obviously, it was cool at the time but we’ve moved past it now, with a need for more nuance. He exhibits a lot of nuance and forethought in later books (I adore Monstrous Regiment, it’s basically a whole book about Mulans, lots of kicking pervs in the balls and questioning why women aren’t valued enough) but he was trying to break into a genre that catered to white male fantasy at the time. So I excuse his first books.

So yeah! I would love to hear your thoughts if you take any of these directions, and answer any questions! The wiki is very good but isn’t perfect, and while my memory may be a little fuzzy, I can certainly try to help. And maybe this summer I’ll finally collect and read all the Science of Discworld books!

*Pyramids Part 1 Part 2 These seem to be a different video than the one I’ve listened to over the years so idk the quality

** Levar Burton Reads Troll Bridge. It’s melancholy but has a hopeful ending. Listen at your own emotional risk (I didn’t cry but I was a little sad for a bit)

*** Hogfather And Going Postal Part 1 if you have time. I think they’re on Prime or Peacock if you have those though. I couldn’t find a good link for the second part ugh

[noirandchocolate]

Honestly though if you read Sourcery and didn’t end up loving Rincewind I genuinely don’t understand why not.

The dude has zero magical ability despite being sure to his bones that he’s a wizard.  He is a wizard, but he’s basically the worst at actual magic.  And he comes back to Ankh-Morpork and sees what’s happened to the city, and he goes over to the blinding white tower of pure magical energy...  And he grabs a half-brick, puts it in his sock, and prepares to go try his best to defeat the sourcerer.  A being he knows full well is more powerful than anything else on the Disc.  He saw in Al Khali what sourcerer-upgraded wizardry could do.  He’s seen the beams of magic flashing across the sky all the way back home.  But he goes anyway, because someone needs to stop this.

And then he sees the sourcerer is a little boy, and even has a semi-normal conversation with Coin before the Ipslore-staff interrupts and tries to make Coin kill him.  Sure, Rincewind’s first statement of ‘You don’t have to do that’ is self-serving.  But the instant the staff lashes out at Coin for disobeying, physically hurting the child and calling him bad, the least powerful wizard on the Disc does what no other wizard had the guts or inclination to do--he attacks the staff.  Doesn’t even really think about it, just straight up smashes his half-brick into it.  Because it hurt Coin. 

Moments later, when Coin is battling the staff himself and the two are drawing on everything magical in the vicinity to try to out-power each other, and while knowing that the tower everyone is standing on is itself made of magic, Rincewind hesitates to join the other wizards in running away.  He says, ‘Aren’t we going to help him?’ and calls the others out for using Coin to power themselves up but not helping him when he--again, a child--needs it.  Rincewind is the only person who intervenes.  Knowing, again, full well how dangerous that will be. 

And he ends up pulled into the Dungeon Dimensions for it.  And sitting there, with Coin, he actually tries to make things less scary for the boy.  And then he fills his remaining sock with otherworldly sand and says, ‘When I shout, you make a run for the light. Do you understand? No looking back or anything. No matter what happens.’  And he tells Coin to remember who and what he is and not let anyone ever tell him different.  And then this self-described ‘coward’ distracts the Demon Things of the Dungeon Dimensions so Coin can escape alone.  Just attacks them and runs away--after all, running is the thing he’s best at--hoping the creatures will follow him and leave the child alone.  That’s the last you see of him in the book.  He doesn’t get out at the last second.  He stays.

So yeah, Rincewind is a comedic character a lot of the time and yeah, many Disc fans tend to sleep on his books and tell others not to bother reading them (apart from his relationship with Twoflower which is always somewhat popular), BUT.  Dude saw an abused child, immediately recognized that what was being done to the kiddo was wrong, and risked his very existence to save a boy he didn’t even know.  So...yes if you don’t love Rincewind after reading Sourcery I really just don’t know why!

[squadron-of-damned]

1/3) The book being praised for something you don't see in it (or isn't even there) doesn't mean that it's not a good book, you know that, right? It just means that people misinterpret it, which is kinda their problem. Not the problem of the book. I don't remember TP announcing "HEY LOOK EVERYONE THIS BOOK IS HERE TO PROMOTE FEMINISM! I AM THE SAVIOUR OF FEMINISIM IN FANTASY!!!".

This is long, so I’ll split this into points, okay? Okay. Here goes:

I cannot disagree that book being misinterpreted as something that it isn’t has no impact on the quality of that book. If my previous answer made it seem that I consider Monstrous Regiment lacking quality because of its interpretation by the readers, I apologize, that came out wrong.

Unrelated to any interpretations of it, I still don’t consider Monstrous Regiment a good book. (I read it way before I came into any sort of a Discworld community, so I know that other people interpretations don’t cloud my judgement here.) The handling of the plot, the narrative construction, the characters, and the development is simply weak. Jokes sadly don’t make a good literature.

That last sentence might come as hypocritical of me and it probably is, because if you have scrounged thorough my AO3, you have probably noticed that I stuff a lot of jokes into my stories. I acknowledge that it doesn’t make the stories a better piece of literature, but I aim to please here. I’m running a sort of a research on that and if a story has a bunch of jokes (their quality doesn’t matter much), more people read it and comment it. (I am deeply convinced that my best works are Cosette Chapeau, all the It’s Quiet In Basketville stories, Rain, if. and They Hadn’t Met at the End of the World.) OK, interruption over.

Tumblr is a hellsite and the overall approach here doesn’t help anything, true. Super annoying and super unhealthy this “Be Pure Or Be Not At All” attitude. I wish I knew where it came from. (No, I don’t really. But if I knew, I might be more focus-angry about it, now I have to be only vague-angry. Does that make sense?) While completely unrelated, the original post which has brought us here, however, was made in reaction on the Discworld Discord server. Although, that doesn’t belittle your point at all. Come to think about it, a lot of those people on the Discord server came there from Tumblr, most likely.

Back to point 2, but your ask comes to it again: It’s not well written, the character develpmont isn’t worth an old slipper if it happened at all, if you measure by something so subjective as relatableness, I can tell you I can’t relate to any single person there, and if the character development is worth an old slipper, the plot is worth, like, half a sole.

The most irking of all is the combination of being praised as the UwU Pure Perfect And The Best Book and actually being the boiled wilted spinach from refrigerator (You know the one, the one they made in your school canteen? The one which didn’t classify as goo only because there were bits in it? Like, it was edible and din’t have much of a taste, but it represented everything bad with the school canteen? No? My, what school canteen had you even? Can I see it, please?).

The fact that it isn’t a good book doesn’t make it a horrible book, though. I am saying it’s bad, but I’m picky. It’s just not good.

The fact that it isn’t a good book doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy it. You surely can. If you enjoy it, good for you. I’m glad you have fun.

Okay, book talk over, let’s look at the ladies.

Look at the characters of: Susan Sto Helin, Granny Weatherwax, Tiffany Aching. Just the main heroes, those show it the most. Or even Tiffany and Susan. You find out that basically all that they have different are the circumstances. Pratchett’s women are Strong Independent Ladies who take None Of Your Bullshit, and Aren’t Paid Enough To Solve Your Problems And Will Let You Know It but Will Solve It Anyway Because Someone Has To.

Their weakness is their pride and self-confidence.

It’s like those dress up games where you can change the hairstyles and clothes and that’s it. It might look a bit different, but the blueprint is the same. Once you notice this Independent Woman thing, you start seeing it everywhere. Ms. Cake, Angua, Cheery, Rosie Palm, Madam Meserole.

The characters which didn’t start as that evolve into it. In case of Cheery it was over the spawn of 1 book. Magrat took a bit longer, maybe. I mean, I haven’t really paid her much attention when I read about her when I was younger and then Lords and Ladies happened.

I give credits to Terry realizing that women aren’t just a romantic interest, but I would like to see the same amount of differences between female characters like he as among men. A Deciever like Lipwig is. someone selfishly-blind and sometimes blindly-stupid as Downey? Well meaning but quite useless as Verence? Good in theory but idiot in normal life like Stibbon? What about just simply driven by desire for material (and maybe emotional) security (that is Rincewind)?

Sybil Ramkin is quite the exception. Yes, she is also a Strong Independent woman, but she doesn’t rub it into everyone’s face just because. She shows her strength and independence only when there is no one to do it instead, or when she is asked to. But it’s not her job otherwise and she isn’t going to show off.

Okay, another exception is Nightshade in Shepherd’s Crown. Have read that book only once, but okay, this one had a lot of character development for one book.

There are surely some other exceptions, but the thing is that they are very very very very minor. You are more likely to find two basically same female characters than different ones.

(I am a bit salty about that because it gave me the wrong idea about what I was supposed to grow up into, but that’s more of a me-problem.)

If I wasn’t clear somewhere, let me know. My only problem is that I am not good at explaining things that come as obvious to me.

[garden-ghoul]

come listen to me talk about wizard sexism, see wizard sexism neatly resolved, and continue to have wizard sexism in every other book about wizards pratchett writes after 1987! time: 17:28. transcript under the cut. 

Hello and welcome to It’s Yelling All the Way Down, where ONCE AGAIN we’re talking about wizards. But at least we’ve got some witches to balance them out. Yes, this week I’ve rolled up Equal Rites.

I would like it to be clearly understood that this book is not wacky. Only dumb redheads in fifties' sitcoms are wacky.

No, it's not zany, either.

This is a story about magic and where it goes and perhaps more importantly where it comes from and why, although it doesn't pretend to answer all or any of these questions.

It may, however, help to explain why Gandalf never got married and why Merlin was a man. Because this is also a story about sex, although probably not in the athletic, tumbling, count-the-legs-and-divide-by-two sense unless the characters get totally beyond the author's control.

Yeah. You remember in the Sourcery notes I mentioned how Sir Terry likes to talk about “if a man was a witch he’d be a wizard”? This book is Completely About That. And he wasn’t really lying in the introduction, it’s very seldom even funny. Maybe he was just trying to get away from his first two books, The Colour of Magic and The Light Fantastic, which are zany to the point of irritation as I recall. Despite being pretty obnoxious, it’s a good introduction because it clearly states the purpose of the book: to be a response to pop culture concepts of wizards in the 1980s. He describes Discworld as a place “where things are less as they are and more as people imagine them to be,” which makes it the perfect vehicle for discussions of culture!

The book begins, again, with a wizard dying and passing on his staff. He’s come to Bad Ass to meet the newly born eighth son of an eighth son—a smith, as it happens. Granny Weatherwax is the midwife and she does keep trying to tell the smith and the wizard that the eighth son is a first daughter, but it’s too late! The baby has already held the staff. She’s a wizard now. Which I guess answers how Rincewind became a wizard—presumably he inherited it because no-one could have predicted his total lack of magical aptitude, although I don’t remember him having a staff or any kind of magical artifact. Is that why he’s such an awful wizard? Well, after the wizard dies Granny tells Smith to burn the staff, because she’s adamant that a woman shouldn’t be a wizard because “it’s the wrong kind of magic” and “she’d never grasp it.” Which is a bizarrely strong sexist opinion for her to have, but then, she is a traditionalist. She tries to destroy the staff but it’s not having that, and she gives up in a huff.

We skip some time. The little girl, Eskarina Smith, grows up with a love of the outdoors. She has the protection of her staff (which is so bound to her that she’s hurt when it is) and a mean apple tree (which turns out to be the wizard, reincarnated). She also seems to have an instinct for the rules of magic and the kind of laws it obeys. We start out with a really charming little kids’ adventure where Esk and two of her brothers go to Granny’s cottage to bring her some food and find her apparently dead on her bed. Esk has heard there will be demons trying to take the body and has barred all the doors and windows, but something is trying to get in the chimney, so she runs out the door and into the thick snowy night. She comes across a pack of very hungry wolves… which are summarily dispatched when her staff flies over and beats them all up. Granny gets back into her own body after a stint as a crow and takes her in to talk magic.

Esk’s instinct for magic manifests as a leaning toward fire spells, something any apprentice wizard can do but something a witch can’t, because a fire hasn’t got a mind. An interesting distinction early on: a witch manipulates minds, not physical properties of matter.

Borrowing was the sort of thing wizards could never know. If it occurred to them to enter a creature's mind they'd do it like a thief, not out of wickedness but because it simply wouldn't occur to them to do it any other way, the daft buggers. And what good would it do to take over an owl's body? You couldn't fly, you needed to spend a lifetime learning. But the gentle way was to ride in its mind, steering it as gently as a breeze stirs a leaf.

Granny figures if Esk learns witch magic it will overwrite the wizard magic or something, so she takes Esk as an apprentice. Witch’s magic is knowing things other people don’t know. It’s making yourself strange to other people. It’s watching closely for signs and pattern recognition. Granny tells Esk it relies on “headology:” if people think you’re doing magic, then you are. But also… you can directly manipulate minds. She teaches Esk Borrowing, but Esk has uh wizard thought patterns from the staff, I guess? And she wants to take over the eagle’s mind that they’re practicing on. Esk takes full control and jets off, leaving Granny to carry her body home.

The next day Granny has to get the staff to carry her to where the eagle is because Esk has completely lost herself in it and her mind needs to be, hm, manually extracted. She sleeps deep and in the morning Granny gives in and presents her with the staff. Esk turns out to have an instinct for FIREBALLS, which is the last straw: Granny decides she’s got to study at the university, otherwise she might burn down something important. Also, she turned her brother into a pig.

Granny is going to escort her to the University despite not knowing where it is. It’s actually kind of endearing how Granny has never been out of the mountains, doesn’t know anything, and is EXTREMELY suspicious of anyone from the city. (Here read: town of a couple hundred people or more.)

Esk does her best to get lost in the crowd and inadvertently curses a bunch of people; has a misadventure with an innkeeper who wants to use her staff to turn all his beer into brandy; and accidentally stows away on a merchant boat going down the river. We get a very cute little section detailing her powers, which partly consist of seeing things as they really are (a power I suspect wizards and witches share), and partly of rearranging the world to be more convenient (that one’s all wizard). But power, when you’re a small kid, doesn’t necessarily make people respect you. Most of the time it makes them want to take advantage of you, so she has to leave the boat merchants and fall in with a caravan.

In fact, she happens to fall in with a caravan that has a couple of wizards, who are for protection and/or starting fires in the wilderness. Esk spends some time talking to the teen apprentice wizard, Simon, who’s basically a cruel caricature of everything teens have anxiety about: acne, speech impediments, and being good at things right up until you try to show them to someone. She also talks to his master wizard, who is very wizard-stylish and explains VERY condescendingly why women are too stupid to be wizards. Esk runs off into the wilderness in tears and we get this fabulous bit of narration:

Why was it that, when she heard Granny ramble on about witchcraft she longed for the cutting magic of wizardry, but whenever she heard Treatle speak in his high-pitched voice she would fight to the death for witchcraft? She'd be both, or none at all. And the more they intended to stop her, the more she wanted it.

She'd be a witch and a wizard too. And she would show them.

I feel like Pratchett is at his best when he’s writing about kids crying in frustration about how tough it is to be a kid. And isn’t this a huge gender mood? This is kind of how I feel about gender, at least. Pratchett is very willing to write gender-nonconforming girls and I only wish he would do boys the same courtesy. But women wanting to be men is basically a fantasy staple because a man is Empirically the better thing to be, SO. Blech.

Esk goes to sleep in a bramble and has what looks to be the familiar Dungeon Dimension dream that apparently all wizards just have every night from opening their minds to the Things that lurk outside reality. Wow that sucks. Instead she has a dream that she’s trying to get into an enormous door by blasting at it with her staff, but it absorbs everything she throws at it and then sniggers at her. When she wakes up she is sure it’s a True Dream, as she tells Granny, who has caught up to her finally. (Spoilers: it absolutely is a true dream, but I’m not sure whether that’s a coincidence).

They make it to Ankh-Morpork and get lodgings in the most dangerous part of the city because who’s going to rob Granny Weatherwax? In fact she makes off pretty well because a city needs a witch even if they’ve never met one.

She was at first annoyed, and then embarrassed, and then flattered; her clients had money, which was useful, but they also paid in respect, and that was a rock-hard currency.

There’s a subplot where Granny starts putting on airs, which is as close as this book gets to comic relief, and it’s really cute.

Esk does manage to get into the University with Simon and his master, who apparently thinks it will be funny to bring a nine-year-old in to be laughed at by a bunch of grown men. Simon, who is applying for entry, demonstrates some kind of very difficult and impressive spell that not only invites in the Dungeon Dimensions but makes him pass out as well. Esk asks if she can be admitted too but when called upon to demonstrate any wizard magic she gets stage fright and everyone laughs at her. Poor mite. When Granny hears about her horrible failure she gets Esk in the back way: by ingratiating herself with the head housekeeper and getting Esk hired as a servant.

Esk has an easy time! She gets to sleep in until 5 AM and the staff does all the sweeping for her. She can listen in on lectures but they’re all nonsense, and she comes to the conclusion that if she wants to be a wizard she’s going to have to learn how to read. So she goes to the library and picks up the first book she sees, which is the Demonology Maleficorum of Henchanse the Unsatisfactory (not a good first book to pick). And she finds Simon, of course, a great reader.  Simon is a bit of an odd one; sometimes when he’s just giving a talk the Dungeon Dimension starts to bleed into reality, and again in the library we get the impression that it just follows him around waiting for its opportunity to get in. The books start to become agitated. The floor starts to become sand. And Esk’s staff whacks Simon to make him stop being a conduit for extradimensional horrors. It seems to want to murder him, which on a utilitarian value-scale seems like a pretty good idea. Especially when we find out that Simon won’t wake for days afterward: like someone gone Borrowing, his mind is outside his head. He’s basically been taken prisoner. And in a delightful callback to Granny’s Borrowing at the very beginning, she warns Esk that something is probably going to try to get into his body and pretend to be him.

Granny goes into the Great Wizard Hall to yell at the wizards so they know what’s going on, but  gets completely distracted having a duel with the Arch-chancellor. REALLY, Granny. So it’s up to Esk to save Simon and the universe. To my delight, when she encounters the locked door into Simon’s room, rather than trying to blast it open she solves the problem the witch’s way: she Borrows the University building and  gently uncurls one finger.

She wakes in the Dungeon Dimension, watching a thing that looks like Simon shaking a little snow globe with her entire planet inside, trying to crack it open. She steals it and sets about kicking all the Things in the shins that are watching him, and to her surprise they fold like wet cardboard. At least until they figure out they can hurt Simon to make her do what they want.

Outside of Esk’s head, Granny and the Arch-chancellor have gone on a perilous journey in the storm to retrieve her staff, which she threw away after it sensibly tried to murder Simon. Granny puts it on her unconscious body, but she can’t use it, and somehow Granny deduces this is because she isn’t an official wizard yet. So she gets the Arch-chancellor to declare her one. Suddenly dream-Esk has her staff, and the Things are never so afraid as when she refuses to use it. They feed off magic, see, and if all the wizards stopped using it, why that’d be terrifying!

“I'd really like to work this out,” said Simon again, turning the staff over and over in his hands. “We could set up some experiments, you know, into deliberately not using magic. We could carefully not draw an octogram on the floor, and we could deliberately not call up all sorts of things, and—it makes me sweat just to think about it!”

The kids are all right! They come out just fine. Esk receives a wizard hat and for some baffling reason Simon has left his stutter in the dungeon dimensions, because no story can have a happy ending if someone still has a speech impediment at the end. Is Sir Terry implying that only insatiably curious magicians stutter? That the stutter represents unwise magic use? Does he think people only stutter out of a lack of confidence? Anyway, in the short epilogue Granny and the Arch-chancellor fix wizard sexism and Esk and Simon develop a whole new branch of magic that is incomprehensible but very nice. Sir Terry fails to mention this for the next thirty years. The end.

(I mean, maybe he mentioned it in Unseen Academicals or something and I forgot? And I’ve heard Esk is in the 5th Tiffany Aching book. But honestly this is such a bombshell to drop RIGHT at the beginning of your series and never follow up on. I’m disappointed in him! Because this is a really, really exciting paradigm shift to leave us with, and not getting to hear about it is like torture! I can’t wait to see Esk becoming a confident young woman who argues with everyone and has loads of cool friends! Say what you like about Sir Terry, say what you like about him being kind of sexist, but he really does understand that women are people, which is a low bar that fantasy OFTEN does not pass, still in 2019.)

 Well, anyway. Time for themes.

First theme: Gender is fake and the only thing that really influences how people think is the people and/or wizard staffs that bring them up.

Second theme: Gender is extremely real and fucks people up constantly. Obviously magical philosophy is used as a standin for gender, here, which makes Esk bigender or possibly trigender. Simon can come too. I’m here to make everyone trans.

It also has slightly more helpful things to say about Being Different than our last book, Sourcery. Sourcery tells us that if we have needs and abilities that don’t fit in our best option is exile in the eternal loneliness dimension. Equal Rites tells us that if we have needs and abilities that don’t fit in we will be mercilessly mocked for it but there may be a way to carve out a space if we find other weirdos like ourselves!

Relatedly, being a kid or a teen basically sucks, because no-one will take you seriously, or if they do they’ll try to make you into whatever they want you to be. I think this book captures a little of the inherent messiness of growing up, and once again advises readers to try to find someone else who’s having a hard time to commiserate with.

 So that’s this week’s thought: in what ways are you weird? In what places are you uncomfortable? How can you make these places more comfortable for yourself and other weird people? What unlikely alliances can you make?

Honestly this is my favorite bit of the podcast. All right, all right, we’re done here. Shabbat shalom and have a great week, everyone! Bye!

(non-transcript note: do you want to cohost an episode of yelling all the way down? talk to me! I’d love to do a book club thing! you WILL have to be patient with me while we figure out how to record a voice call, though.)

[discworldtour]

“Certainly messed the place up before they went,” said Ridcully. Rincewind had been watching a rat scuttle away into the debris, but the words sunk in and exploded in his head. “Messed up?” he growled. “How?” “Say again?” said Ridcully. “Did you see the weather report for this world?” said Rincewind, waving his hands in the air. “Two miles of ice, followed by a light shower of rocks, with outbreaks of choking fog for the next thousand years? There will be widespread vulcanism as half a continent’s worth of magma lets go, followed by a period of mountain building? And that’s normal.” “Yes, well--” “Oh, yes, there are some nice quiet periods, everything settles down, and then -- whammo!” “There’s no need to get so excited--” “I’ve been here!” said Rincewind. “This is how this place works!” And now, please, you tell me how, I mean how, can anything living on this world possibly mess it up? I mean, compared to what happens anyway?” He paused, and gulped air. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, if you pick the right time, yes, sure, it’s a great world for a holiday, ten thousand years, even a few million if you’re lucky with the weather but, good grief, it’s just not a serious proposition for anything long term. It’s a great place to grow up on, but you wouldn’t wan tot live here. If anything’s got off, the best of luck to them.“ He waved a finger at the rat, who was watching them suspiciously. Underneath them, the ground trembled again. “See him?” he said. “We know what’s going to happen. In a million years or so his kids are going to be saying, wow, what a great world the Big Rat made for us. Or it’ll be the turn of the jellyfish, or something that’s still bobbing around under the sea that we don’t even know about yet! There’s no future here! No, that’s wrong... I mean there’s always a future, but it belongs to someone else. You know what chalk’s made of here? Dead animals! the actual rock is made of dead animals! There were some...” Even in his overheated state, he paused. It probably wasn’t a good idea to remind people about the apes. A vague, suspicious guilt was nudging him. “There were these creatures,” he said, “and they were using limestone caves. Limestone’s made from ancient blobs, I saw it being made, like snow in the water... and these creatures are living in the bones of their ancestors! Really! This place... this place is a kaleidoscope. You smash it up, wait a moment, and there’s another pretty pattern. And another one. And another o...” he stopped. And sagged. “Could I have a glass of water, please?”

-- on this kaleidoscopic world | Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart, and Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld

[readbookywooks]

Something terrible is happening at the University. It is vital that we are not taken back, do you understand? You must take us to Klatch, where there is someone fit to wear me.

‘Why?’ There was something very strange about the voice, Rincewind decided. It sounded impossible to disobey, as though it was solid destiny. If it told him to walk over a cliff, he thought, he’d be halfway down before it could occur to him to disobey.

The death of all wizardry is at hand.

Rincewind looked around guiltily.

‘Why?’ he said.

The world is going to end.

‘What, again?’

I mean it, said the hat sulkily. The triumph of the Ice Giants, the Apocralypse, the Teatime of the Gods, the whole thing.

‘Can we stop it?’

The future is uncertain on that point.

Rincewind’s expression of determined terror faded slowly.

‘Is this a riddle?’ he said.

Perhaps it would be simpler if you just did what you’re told and didn’t try to understand things, said the hat. Young woman, you will put us back in our box. A great many people will shortly be looking for us.

‘Hey, hold on,’ said Rincewind. ‘I’ve seen you around here for years and you never talked before.’

I didn’t have anything that needed to be said.

Rincewind nodded. That seemed reasonable.

‘Look, just shove it in its box, and let’s get going,’ said the girl.

A bit more respect if you please, young lady,’ said Rincewind haughtily. ‘That is the symbol of ancient wizardry you happen to be addressing.’

‘You carry it, then,’ she said.

‘Hey, look,’ said Rincewind, scrambling along after her as she swept down the alleys, crossed a narrow street and entered another alley between a couple of houses that leaned together so drunkenly that their upper storeys actually touched. She stopped.

‘Well?’ she snapped.

‘You’re the mystery thief, aren’t you?’ he said, ‘Everyone’s been talking about you, how you’ve taken things even from locked rooms and everything. You’re different than I imagined…’

‘Oh?’ she said coldly. ‘How?’

‘Well, you’re … shorter.’

‘Oh, come on.’

The street cressets, not particularly common in this part of the city in any case, gave out altogether here. There was nothing but watchful darkness ahead.

‘I said come on,’ she repeated. ‘What are you afraid of?’

Rincewind took a deep breath. ‘Murderers, muggers, thieves, assassins, pickpockets, cutpurses, reevers, snigsmen, rapists and robbers,’ he said. ‘That’s the Shades you’re going into!’[8]

‘Yes, but people won’t come looking for us in here,’ she said.

‘Oh, they’ll come in all right, they just won’t come out,’ said Rincewind. ‘Nor will we. I mean, a beautiful young woman like you … it doesn’t bear thinking about … I mean, some of the people in there …’

‘But I’ll have you to protect me,’ she said.

Rincewind thought he heard the sound of marching feet several streets away.

‘You know,’ he sighed, ‘I knew you’d say that.’

Down these mean streets a man must walk, he thought. And along some of them he will break into a run.

It is so black in the Shades on this foggy spring night that it would be too dark to read about Rincewind’s progress through the eerie streets, so the descriptive passage will lift up above the level of the ornate rooftops, the forest of twisty chimneys, and admire the few twinkling stars that manage to pierce the swirling billows. It will try to ignore the sounds drifting up from below the patter of feet, the rushes, the gristly noises, the groans, the muffled screams. It could be that some wild animal is pacing through the Shades after two weeks on a starvation diet.

Somewhere near the centre of the Shades - the district has never been adequately mapped - is a small courtyard. Here at least there are torches on the walls, but the light they throw is the light of the Shades themselves: mean, reddened, dark at the core.

Rincewind staggered into the yard and hung on to the wall for support. The girl stepped into the ruddy light behind him, humming to herself.

‘Are you all right?’ she said.

‘Nurrgh,’ said Rincewind.

‘Sorry?’

‘Those men,’ he bubbled, ‘I mean, the way you kicked his … when you grabbed them by the … when you stabbed that one right in … who are you?’

‘My name is Conina.’

Rincewind looked at her blankly for some time.

‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘doesn’t ring a bell.’

‘I haven’t been here long,’ she said.

‘Yes, I didn’t think you were from around these parts,’ he said. ‘I would have heard.’

‘I’ve taken lodgings here. Shall we go in?’

Rincewind glanced up at the dingy pole just visible in the smoky light of the spitting torches. It indicated that the hostelry behind the small dark door was the Troll’s Head.

It might be thought that the Mended Drum, scene of unseemly scuffles only an hour ago, was a seedy disreputable tavern. In fact it was a reputable disreputable tavern. Its customers had a certain rough-hewn respectability - they might murder each other in an easygoing way, as between equals, but they didn’t do it vindictively. A child could go in for a glass of lemonade and be certain of getting nothing worse than a clip round the ear when his mother heard his expanded vocabulary. On quiet nights, and when he was certain the Librarian wasn’t going to come in, the landlord was even known to put bowls of peanuts on the bar.

The Troll’s Head was a cesspit of a different odour. Its customers, if they reformed, tidied themselves up and generally improved their image out of all recognition might, just might, aspire to be considered the utter dregs of humanity. And in the Shades, a dreg is a dreg.

By the way, the thing on the pole isn’t a sign. When they decided to call the place the Troll’s Head, they didn’t mess about.

Feeling sick, and clutching the grumbling hatbox to his chest, Rincewind stepped inside.

Silence. It wrapped itself around them, nearly as thickly as the smoke of a dozen substances guaranteed to turn any normal brain to cheese. Suspicious eyes peered through the smog.

A couple of dice clattered to a halt on a tabletop. They sounded very loud, and probably weren’t showing Rincewind’s lucky number.

He was aware of the stares of several score of customers as he followed the demure and surprisingly small figure of Conina into the room. He looked sideways into the leering faces of men who would kill him sooner than think, and in fact would find it a great deal easier.

Where a respectable tavern would have had a bar there was just a row of squat black bottles and a couple of big barrels on trestles against the wall.

The silence tightened like a tourniquet. Any minute now, Rincewind thought.

A big fat man wearing nothing but a fur vest and a leather loincloth pushed back his stool and lurched to his feet and winked evilly at his colleagues. When his mouth opened, it was like a hole with a hem.

‘Looking for a man, little lady?’ he said.

She looked up at him.

‘Please keep away’

A snake of laughter writhed around the room. Conina’s mouth snapped shut like a letterbox.

‘Ah,’ the big man gurgled, ‘that’s right, I likes a girl with spirit-’

Conina’s hand moved. It was a pale blur, stopping here and here: after a few seconds of disbelief the man gave a little grunt and folded up, very slowly.

Rincewind shrank back as every other man in the room leaned forward. His instinct was to run, and he knew it was an instinct that would get him instantly killed. It was the Shades out there. Whatever was going to happen to him next was going to happen to him here. It was not a reassuring thought.

A hand closed around his mouth. Two more grabbed the hatbox from his arms.

Conina spun past him, lifting her skirt to place a neat foot on a target beside Rincewind’s waist. Someone whimpered in his ear and collapsed. As the girl pirouetted gracefully around she picked up two bottles, knocked out their bottoms on the shelf and landed with their jagged ends held out in front of her. Morpork daggers, they were called in the patois of the streets.

In the face of them, the Troll’s Head’s clientele lost interest.

‘Someone got the hat,’ Rincewind muttered through dry lips, ‘They slipped out of the back way.’

She glared at him and made for the door. The Head’s crowd of customers parted automatically, like sharks recognising another shark, and Rincewind darted anxiously after her before they came to any conclusion about him.

They ran out into another alley and pounded down it. Rincewind tried to keep up with the girl; people following her tended to tread on sharp things, and he wasn’t sure she’d remember he was on her side, whatever side that was.

A thin, half-hearted drizzle was falling. And at the end of the alley was a faint blue glow.

‘Wait!’

The terror in Rincewind’s voice was enough to slow her down.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Why’s he stopped?’

‘I’ll ask him,’ said Conina, firmly.

‘Why’s he covered in snow?’

She stopped and turned around, arms thrust into her sides, one foot tapping impatiently on the damp cobbles.

‘Rincewind, I’ve known you for an hour and I’m astonished you’ve lived even that long!’

‘Yes, but I have, haven’t I? I’ve got a sort of talent for it. Ask anyone. I’m an addict.’

‘Addicted to what?’

‘Life. I got hooked on it at an early age and I don’t want to give it up and take it from me, this doesn’t look right!’

Conina looked back at the figure surrounded by the glowing blue aura. It seemed to be looking at something in its hands.

Snow was settling on its shoulder like really bad dandruff. Terminal dandruff. Rincewind had an instinct for these things, and he had a deep suspicion that the man had gone where shampoo would be no help at all.

They sidled along a glistening wall.

‘There’s something very strange about him,’ she conceded.

‘You mean the way he’s got his own private blizzard?’

‘Doesn’t seem to upset him. He’s smiling.’

‘A frozen grin, I’d call it.’

The man’s icicle-hung hands had been taking the lid off the box, and the glow from the hat’s octarines shone up into a pair of greedy eyes that were already heavily rimed with frost.

‘Know him?’ said Conina.

Rincewind shrugged. ‘I’ve seen him around,’ he said. ‘He’s called Larry the Fox or Fezzy the Stoat or something. Some sort of rodent, anyway. He just steals things. He’s harmless.’

‘He looks incredibly cold.’ Conina shivered.

‘I expect he’s gone to a warmer place. Don’t you think we should shut the box?’

It’s perfectly safe now, said the hat’s voice from inside the glow. And so perish all enemies of wizardry.

[readbookywooks]

Rincewind wasn’t about to trust what a hat said.

‘We need something to shut the lid,’ he muttered. ‘A knife or something. You wouldn’t have one, would you?’

‘Look the other way,’ Conina warned.

There was a rustle and another gust of perfume.

‘You can look back now.’

Rincewind was handed a twelve-inch throwing knife. He took it gingerly. Little particles of metal glinted on its edge.

‘Thanks.’ He turned back. ‘Not leaving you short, am I?’

‘I have others.’

‘I’ll bet.’

Rincewind reached out gingerly with the knife. As it neared the leather box its blade went white and started to steam. He whimpered a little as the cold struck his hand - a burning, stabbing cold, a cold that crept up his arm and made a determined assault on his mind. He forced his numb fingers into action and, with great effort, nudged the edge of the lid with the tip of the blade.

The glow faded. The snow became sleet, then melted into drizzle.

Conina nudged him aside and pulled the box out of the frozen arms.

‘I wish there was something we could do for him. It seems wrong just to leave him here.’

‘He won’t mind,’ said Rincewind, with conviction.

‘Yes, but we could at least lean him against the wall. Or something.’

Rincewind nodded, and grabbed the frozen thief by his icicle arm. The man slipped out of his grasp and hit the cobbles.

Where he shattered.

Conina looked at the pieces.

‘Urg,’ she said.

There was a disturbance further up the alley, coming from the back door of the Troll’s Head. Rincewind felt the knife snatched from his hand and then go past his ear in a flat trajectory that ended in the doorpost twenty yards away. A head that had been sticking out withdrew hurriedly.

‘We’d better go,’ said Conina, hurrying along the alley. ‘Is there somewhere we can hide? Your place?’

‘I generally sleep at the University,’ said Rincewind, hopping along behind her.

You must not return to the University, growled the hat from the depths of its box. Rincewind nodded distractedly. The idea certainly didn’t seem attractive.

‘Anyway, they don’t allow women inside after dark,’ he said.

‘And before dark?’

‘Not then, either.’

Conina sighed. ‘That’s silly. What have you wizards got against women, then?’

Rincewind’s brow wrinkled. ‘We’re not supposed to put anything against women,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole point.’

Sinister grey mists rolled through the docks of Morpork, dripping from the rigging, coiling around the drunken rooftops, lurking in alleys. The docks at night were thought by some to be even more dangerous than the Shades. Two muggers, a sneak thief and someone who had merely tapped Conina on the shoulder to ask her the time had already found this out.

‘Do you mind if I ask you a question?’ said Rincewind, stepping over the luckless pedestrian who lay coiled around his private pain.

Well?’

‘I mean, I wouldn’t like to cause offence.’

Well?’

‘It’s just that I can’t help noticing-’

‘Hmmm?’

‘You have this certain way with strangers.’ Rincewind ducked, but nothing happened.

What are you doing down there?’ said Conina, testily.

,Sorry.,

‘I know what you’re thinking. I can’t help it, I take after my father.’

Who was he, then? Cohen the Barbarian?’ Rincewind grinned to show it was a joke. At least, his lips moved in a desperate crescent.

‘No need to laugh about it, wizard.’

‘What?’

‘It’s not my fault.’

Rincewind’s lips moved soundlessly. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Have I got this right? Your father really is Cohen the Barbarian?’

‘Yes.’ The girl scowled at Rincewind. ‘Everyone has to have a father,’ she added. ‘Even you, I imagine.’

She peered around a corner.

‘All clear. Come on,’ she said, and then when they were striding along the damp cobbles she continued: ‘I expect your father was a wizard, probably.’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ said Rincewind. ‘Wizardry isn’t allowed to run in families.’ He paused. He knew Cohen, he’d even been a guest at one of his weddings when he married a girl of Conina’s age; you could say this about Cohen, he crammed every hour full of minutes. ‘A lot of people would like to take after Cohen, I mean, he was the best fighter, the greatest thief, he-’

‘A lot of men would,’ Conina snapped. She leaned against a wall and glared at him.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘There’s this long word, see, an old witch told me about it …can’t remember it …you wizards know about long words.’

Rincewind thought about long words. ‘Marmalade?’ he volunteered.

She shook her head irritably. ‘It means you take after your parents.’

Rincewind frowned. He wasn’t too good on the subject of parents.

‘Kleptomania? Recidivist?’ he hazarded.

‘Begins with an H.’

‘Hedonism?’ said Rincewind desperately.

‘Herrydeterry,’ said Conina. ‘This witch explained it to me. My mother was a temple dancer for some mad god or other, and father rescued her, and - they stayed together for a while. They say I get my looks and figure from her.’

‘And very good they are, too,’ said Rincewind, with hopeless gallantry.

She blushed. ‘Yes, well, but from him I got sinews you could moor a boat with, reflexes like a snake on a hot tin, a terrible urge to steal things and this dreadful sensation every time I meet someone that I should be throwing a knife through his eye at ninety feet. I can, too,’ she added with a trace of pride.

‘Gosh.’

‘It tends to put men off.’

Well, it would,’ said Rincewind weakly.

‘I mean, when they find out, it’s very hard to hang on to a boyfriend.’

‘Except by the throat, I imagine,’ said Rincewind.

‘Not what you really need to build up a proper relationship.’

‘No. I can see,’ said Rincewind. ‘Still, pretty good if you want to be a famous barbarian thief.’

But not,’ said Conina, ‘if you want to be a hairdresser.’

‘Ah.’

They stared into the mist.

‘Really a hairdresser?’ said Rincewind.

Conina sighed.

‘Not much call for a barbarian hairdresser, I expect,’ said Rincewind. ‘I mean, no-one wants a shampoo-and-beheading.’

‘It’s just that every time I see a manicure set I get this terrible urge to lay about me with a double-handed cuticle knife. I mean sword,’ said Conina.

Rincewind sighed. ‘I know how it is,’ he said. ‘I wanted to be a wizard.’

‘But you are a wizard.’

‘Ah. Well, of course, but-’

‘Quiet!’

Rincewind found himself rammed against the wall, where a trickle of condensed mist inexplicably began to drip down his neck. A broad throwing knife had mysteriously appeared in Conina’s hand, and she was crouched like a jungle animal or, even worse, a jungle human.

‘What-’ Rincewind began.

‘Shut up!’ she hissed. ‘Something’s coming!’

She stood up in one fluid movement, spun on one leg and let the knife go.

There was a single, hollow, wooden thud.

Conina stood and stared. For once, the heroic blood that pounded through her veins, drowning out all chances of a lifetime in a pink pinny, was totally at a loss.

‘I’ve just killed a wooden box,’ she said.

Rincewind looked round the corner.

The Luggage stood in the dripping street, the knife still quivering in its lid, and stared at her. Then it changed its position slightly, its little legs moving in a complicated tango pattern, and stared at Rincewind. The Luggage didn’t have any features at all, apart from a lock and a couple of hinges, but it could stare better than a rockful of iguanas. It could outstare a glass-eyed statue. When it came to a look of betrayed pathos, the Luggage could leave the average kicked spaniel moping back in its kennel. It had several arrowheads and broken swords sticking in it.

‘What is it?’ hissed Conina.

‘It’s just the Luggage,’ said Rincewind wearily.

‘Does it belong to you?’

‘Not really. Sort of.’

‘Is it dangerous?’

The Luggage shuffled round to stare at her again.

‘There’s two schools of thought about that,’ said Rincewind. ‘There’s some people who say it’s dangerous, and others who say it’s very dangerous. What do you think?’

The Luggage raised its lid a fraction.

The Luggage was made from the wood of the sapient peartree, a plant so magical that it had nearly died out on the Disc and survived only in one or two places; it was a sort of rosebay willowherb, only instead of bomb sites it sprouted in areas that had seen vast expenditures of magic. Wizards’ staves were traditionally made of it; so was the Luggage.

Among the Luggage’s magical qualities was a fairly simple and direct one: it would follow its adopted owner anywhere. Not anywhere in any particular set of dimensions, or country, or universe, or lifetime. Anywhere. It was about as easy to shake off as a head cold and considerably more unpleasant.

The Luggage was also extremely protective of its owner. It would be hard to describe its attitude to the rest of creation, but one could start with the phrase ‘bloody-minded malevolence’ and work up from there.

Conina stared at that lid. It looked very much like a mouth.

‘I think I’d vote for “terminally dangerous”,’ she said.

‘It likes crisps,’ volunteered Rincewind, and then added, ‘Well, that’s a bit strong. It eats crisps.’

‘What about people?’

‘Oh, and people. About fifteen so far; I think.’

‘Were they good or bad?’

‘Just dead, I think. It also does your laundry for you, you put your clothes in and they come out washed and ironed.’

‘And covered in blood?’

‘You know, that’s the funny thing,’ said Rincewind.

‘The funny thing?’ repeated Conina, her eyes not leaving the Luggage.

‘Yes, because, you see, the inside isn’t always the same, it’s sort of multidimensional, and-’

‘How does it feel about women?’

‘Oh, it’s not choosy. It ate a book of spells last year. Sulked for three days and then spat it out.’

‘It’s horrible,’ said Conina, and backed away.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Rincewind, ‘absolutely.’

‘I mean the way it stares!’

‘It’s very good at it, isn’t it?’

We must leave for Klatch, said a voice from the hatbox. One of these boats will be adequate. Commandeer it.

Rincewind looked at the dim, mist-wreathed shapes that loomed in the mist under a forest of rigging. Here and there a riding light made a little fuzzy ball of light in the gloom.

[readbookywooks]

- thought so -, said Rincewind to himself.

‘These people, why did we have them brought here?’

The vizier twirled his moustache, probably foreclosing another dozen mortgages.

‘The hat, highness,’ he said. ‘The hat, if you remember.’

‘Ah, yes. Fascinating. Where did we put it?’

‘Hold on,’ said Rincewind urgently. ‘This hat … it wouldn’t be a sort of battered pointy one, with lots of stuff on it? Sort of lace and stuff, and, and-’ he hesitated-’no-one’s tried to put it on, have they?’

‘It specifically warned us not to,’ said Creosote, ’so Abrim got a slave to try it on, of course. He said it gave him a headache.’

‘It also told us that you would shortly be arriving,’ said the vizier, bowing slightly at Rincewind, ‘and therefore I - that is to say, the Seriph felt that you might be able to tell us more about this wonderful artifact?’

There is a tone of voice known as interrogative, and the vizier was using it; a slight edge to his words suggested that, if he didn’t learn more about the hat very quickly, he had various activities in mind in which further words like ‘red hot’ and ‘knives’ would appear. Of course, all Grand Viziers talk like that all the time. There’s probably a school somewhere.

‘Gosh, I’m glad you’ve found it,’ said Rincewind, ‘That hat is gngngnh-’

‘I beg your pardon?’ said Abrim, signalling a couple of lurking guards to step forward. ‘I missed the bit after the young lady-’ he bowed at Conina-’elbowed you in the ear.’

‘I think,’ said Conina, politely but firmly, ‘you’d better take us to see it.’

Five minutes later, from its resting place on a table in the Seriph’s treasury, the hat said, At last. What kept you?

It is at a time like this, with Rincewind and Conina probably about to be the victims of a murderous attack, and Coin about to address the assembled cowering wizards on the subject of treachery, and the Disc about to fall under a magical dictatorship, that it is worth mentioning the subject of poetry and inspiration.

For example, the Seriph, in his bijou wildernessette, has just riffled back through his pages of verse to revise the lines which begin:

‘Get up! For morning in the cup of day,

Has dropped the spoon that scares the stars away’

- and he has sighed, because the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them.

It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.

Sadly, this sort of thing happens all the time.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place. The shape of DNA, it is popularly said, owes its discovery to the chance sight of a spiral staircase when the scientist’s mind was just at the right receptive temperature. Had he used the lift, the whole science of genetics might have been a good deal different.[16]

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time travelling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss.

Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.

For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of white horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succour and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration therefore fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contribution to the field of tone poetry.

Many civilisations have recognised this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

And so Creosote, who had dreamt the inspiration for a rather fine poem about life and philosophy and how they both look much better through the bottom of a wine glass, was totally unable to do anything about it because he had as much poetic ability as a hyena.

Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.

Actually, the flash of inspiration needed to explain it clearly and precisely has taken place, but the creature who received it -a small female bluetit - has never been able to make the position clear, even after some really strenuous coded messages on the tops of milk bottles. By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables.

Which brings us rather neatly on to the subject of magic.

A long way out in the dark gulfs of interstellar space, one single inspiration particle is clipping along unaware of its destiny, which is just as well, because its destiny is to strike, in a matter of hours, a tiny area of Rincewind’s mind.

It would be a tough destiny even if Rincewind’s creative node was a reasonable size, but the particle’s karma had handed it the problem of hitting a moving target the size of a small raisin over a distance of several hundred lightyears. Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.

If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn’t, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.

The Seriph’s palace, known to legend as the Rhoxie, occupied most of the centre of Al Khali that wasn’t occupied by the wilderness. Most things connected with Creosote were famed in mythology and the arched, domed, many-pillared palace was said to have more rooms than any man had been able to count. Rincewind didn’t know which number he was in.

‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’ said Abrim the vizier.

He prodded Rincewind in the ribs.

‘You’re a wizard,’ he said. ‘Tell me what it does.’

‘How do you know I’m a wizard?’ said Rincewind desperately.

‘It’s written on your hat,’ said the vizier.

‘Ah.’

‘And you were on the boat with it. My men saw you.’

‘The Seriph employs slavers?’ snapped Conina. ‘That doesn’t sound very simple!’

‘Oh, I employ the slavers. I am the vizier, after all,’ said Abrim. ‘It is rather expected of me.’

He gazed thoughtfully at the girl, and then nodded at a couple of the guards.

‘The current Seriph is rather literary in his views,’ he said. ‘I, on the other hand, am not. Take her to the seraglio, although,’ he rolled his eyes and gave an irritable sigh, ‘I’m sure the only fate that awaits her there is boredom, and possibly a sore throat.’

He turned to Rincewind.

‘Don’t say anything,’ he said. ‘Don’t move your hands. Don’t try any sudden feats of magic. I am protected by strange and powerful amulets.’

‘Now just hold on a minute-’ Rincewind began, and Conina said, ‘All right. I’ve always wondered what a harem looked like.’

Rincewind’s mouth went on opening and shutting, but no sounds came out. Finally he managed, ‘Have you?’

She waggled an eyebrow at him. It was probably a signal of some sort. Rincewind felt he ought to have understood it, but peculiar passions were stirring in the depths of his being. They weren’t actually going to make him brave, but they were making him angry. Speeded up, the dialogue behind his eyes was going something like this:

Ugh.

Who’s that?

Your conscience. I feel terrible. Look, they’re marching her off to the harem.

Rather her than me, thought Rincewind, but without much conviction.

Do something!

There’s too many guards! They’ll kill me!

So they’ll kill you, it’s not the end of the world.

It will be for me, thought Rincewind grimly.

But just think how good you’ll feel in your next life -

Look, just shut up, will I? I’ve had just about enough of me.

Abrim stepped across to Rincewind and looked at him curiously.

‘Who are you talking to?’ he said.

‘I warn you,’ said Rincewind, between clenched teeth, ‘I have this magical box on legs which is absolutely merciless with attackers, one word from me and-’

‘I’m impressed,’ said Abrim. ‘Is it invisible?’

Rincewind risked a look behind him.

‘I’m sure I had it when I came in,’ he said, and sagged.

It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind.

Abrim walked slowly around the table on which sat the hat, twirling his moustache.

‘Once again,’ he said, ‘I ask you: this is an artifact of power, I feel it, and you must tell me what it does.’

‘Why don’t you ask it?’ said Rincewind.

‘It refuses to tell me.’

‘Well, why do you want to know?’

Abrim laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it.

‘You’re a wizard,’ he said. ‘Wizardry is about power. I have taken an interest in magic myself. I have the talent, you know.’ The vizier drew himself up stiffly. ‘Oh, yes. But they wouldn’t accept me at your University. They said I was mentally unstable, can you believe that?’

‘No,’ said Rincewind, truthfully. Most of the wizards at Unseen had always seemed to him to be several bricks short of a shilling. Abrim seemed pretty normal wizard material.

Abrim gave him an encouraging smile.

Rincewind looked sideways at the hat. It said nothing. He looked back at the vizier. If the laughter had been weird, the smile made it sound as normal as birdsong. It looked as though the vizier had learned it from diagrams.

‘Wild horses wouldn’t get me to help you in any way,’ he said.

Ah,’ said the vizier. ‘A challenge.’ He beckoned to the nearest guard.

‘Do we have any wild horses in the stables?’

‘Some fairly angry ones, master.’

‘Infuriate four of them and take them to the turnwise courtyard. And, oh, bring several lengths of chain.’

‘Right away, master.’

[readbookywooks]

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 on to 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 realised 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 realise 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 forwards 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 grey and colourless, 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 colour.

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.[18] 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 towards 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.’

[readbookywooks]

‘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 recognise it, but it sounded 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 towards 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 moustache. 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 towards 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 acknowledgement, 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 spectre vanished.

Abrim and the rival wizard were surrounded by a corona of randomised 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. l can draw my power from your power. Yeld 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.[19] 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 realised 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 multicoloured 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.’

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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 towards him.

‘Vot you want?’ 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. Otherwise, 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 world,’ 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 veil 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 on to 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 towards 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, Id 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 towards 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 towards 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?’

‘Gook,’ 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.

‘Gook?’

‘What should I do now?’

‘Gook?’

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.

They 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.

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He remembered something about being able to tell where you were by looking at which side of a tree the moss grew on. These trees had moss everywhere, and wooden warts, and scrabbly old branches; if trees were people, these trees would be sitting in rocking chairs. Rincewind gave the nearest one a kick. With unerring aim it dropped an acorn on him. He said 'Ow.' The tree, in a voice like a very old door swinging open, said, 'Serves you right.' There was a long silence. Then Rincewind said, 'Did you say that?' 'Yes.' 'And that too?' 'Yes.' 'Oh.' He thought for a bit. Then he tried, 'I suppose you wouldn't happen to know the way out of the forest, possibly, by any chance?' 'No. I don't get about much,' said the tree. 'Fairly boring life, I imagine,' said Rincewind. 'I wouldn't know. I've never been anything else,' said the tree. Rincewind looked at it closely. It seemed pretty much like every other tree he'd seen. 'Are you magical?' he said. 'No-one's ever said,' said the tree, 'I suppose so.' Rincewind thought: I can't be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I'd be mad, and I'm not mad, so trees can't talk. 'Goodbye,' he said firmly. 'Hey, don't go,' the tree began, and then realised the hopelessness of it all. It watched him stagger off through the bushes, and settled down to feeling the sun on its leaves, the slurp and gurgle of the water in its roots, and the very ebb and flow of its sap in response to the natural tug of the sun and moon. Boring, it thought. What a trange thing to say. Trees can be bored, of course, beetles do it all the time, but I don't think that was what he was trying to mean. And: can you actually be anything else? In fact Rincewind never spoke to this particular tree again, but from that brief conversation it spun the basis of the first tree religion which, in time, swept the forests of the world. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree, and led a clean, decent and upstanding life, could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper. A few miles away Twoflower was also getting over his surprise at finding himself back on the Disc. He was sitting on the hull of the Potent Voyager as it gurgled gradually under the dark waters of a large lake, surrounded by trees. Strangely enough, he was not particularly worried. Twoflower was a tourist, the first of the species to evolve on the Disc, and fundamental to his very existence was the rock-hard belief that nothing bad could really happen to him because he was not involved; he also believed that anyone could understand anything he said provided he spoke loudly and slowly, that people were basically trustworthy, and that anything could be sorted out among men of goodwill if they just acted sensibly. On the face of it this gave him a survival value marginally less than, say, a soap herring, but to Rincewind's amazement it all seemed to work and the little man's total obliviousness to all forms of danger somehow made danger so discouraged that it gave up and went away. Merely being faced with drowning stood no chance. Twoflower was quite certain that in a well-organised society people would not be allowed to go around getting drowned. He was a little bothered, though, about where his Luggage had got to. But he comforted himself with the nowledge that it was made of sapient pearwood, and ought to be intelligent enough to look after itself . . . In yet another part of the forest a young shaman was undergoing a very essential part of his training. He had eaten of the sacred toadstool, he had smoked the holy rhizome, he had carefully powdered up and inserted into various orifices the mystic mushroom and now, sitting crosslegged under a pine tree, he was concentrating firstly on making contact with the strange and wonderful secrets at the heart of Being but mainly on stopping the top of his head from unscrewing and floating away. Blue four-side triangles pinwheeled across his vision. Occasionally he smiled knowingly at nothing very much and said things like 'Wow' and 'Urgh.' There was a movement in the air and what he later described as 'like, a sort of explosion only backwards, you know?', and suddenly where there had only been nothing there was a large, battered, wooden chest. It landed heavily on the leafmould, extended dozens of little legs, and turned around ponderously to look at the shaman. That is to say, it had no face, but even through the mycological haze he was horribly aware that it was looking at him. And not a nice look, either. It was amazing how baleful a keyhole and a couple of knotholes could be. To his intense relief it gave a sort of wooden shrug, and set off through the trees at a canter. With superhuman effort the shaman recalled the correct sequence of movements for standing up and even managed a couple of steps before he looked down and gave up, having run out of legs. Rincewind, meanwhile, had found a path. It wound about a good deal, and he would have been happier if it had been cobbled, but following it gave him something to do. Several trees tried to strike up a conversation, but Rincewind was nearly certain that this was not normal behaviour for trees and ignored them. The day lengthened. There was no sound but the murmur of nasty little stinging insects, the occasional crack of a falling branch, and the whispering of the trees discussing religion and the trouble with squirrels. Rincewind began to feel very lonely. He imagined himself living in the woods forever, sleeping on leaves and eating . . . and eating . . . whatever there was to eat in woods. Trees, he supposed, and nuts and berries. He would have to . . . 'Rincewind!' There, coming up the path, was Twoflower – dripping wet, but beaming with delight. The Luggage trotted along behind him (anything made of the wood would follow its owner anywhere and it was often used to make luggage for the grave goods of very rich dead kings who wanted to be sure of starting a new life in the next world with clean underwear). Rincewind sighed. Up to now, he'd thought the day couldn't possibly get worse. It began to rain a particularly wet and cold rain. Rincewind and Twoflower sat under a tree and watched it. 'Rincewind?' 'Um?' 'Why are we here?' 'Well, some say that the Creator of the Universe made the Disc and everything on it, others say that its all a very complicated story involving the testicles of the Sky God and the milk of the Celestial Cow, and some even hold that we're all just due to the total random accretion of probability particles. But if you mean why are we here as opposed to falling off the Disc, I haven't the faintest idea. It's probably all some ghastly mistake.' 'Oh. Do you think there's anything to eat in this forest?' 'Yes,' said the wizard bitterly, us.' 'I've got some acorns, if you like,' said the tree helpfully. They sat in damp silence for some moments. 'Rincewind, the tree said—' 'Trees can't talk,' snapped Rincewind. 'It's very important to remember that.' 'But you just heard—' Rincewind sighed. Took,' he said. It's all down to simple biology, isn't it? If you're going to talk you need the right equipment, like lungs and lips and, and—' 'Vocal chords,' said the tree. 'Yeah, them,' said Rincewind. He shut up and stared gloomily at the rain. 'I thought wizards knew all about trees and wild food and things,' said Twoflower reproachfully. It was very seldom that anything in his voice suggested that he thought of Rincewind as anything other than a magnificent enchanter, and the wizard was stung into action. 'I do, I do,' he snapped. 'Well, what kind of tree is this?' said the tourist. Rincewind looked up. 'Beech,' he said firmly. 'Actually—' began the tree, and shut up quickly. It had caught Rincewind's look. 'Those things up there look like acorns,' said Twoflower. 'Yes, well, this is the sessile or heptocarpic variety,' said Rincewind. The nuts look very much like acorns, in fact. They can fool practically anybody.' 'Gosh,' said Twoflower, and, What's that bush over there, then?' 'Mistletoe.' 'But it's got thorns and red berries!' 'Well?' said Rincewind sternly, and stared hard at him. Twoflower broke first. 'Nothing,' he said meekly. 'I must have been misinformed.' 'Right.' 'But there's some big mushrooms under it. Can you eat them?' Rincewind looked at them cautiously. They were, indeed, very big, and had red and white spotted caps. They were in fact a variety that the local shaman (who at this point was some miles away, making friends with a rock) would only eat after first attaching one leg to a large stone with a rope. There was nothing for it but to go out in the rain and look at them. He knelt down in the leafmould and peered under the cap. After a while he said weakly, 'No, no good to eat at all.' 'Why?' called Twoflower. 'Are the gills the wrong shade of yellow?' 'No, not really . . .' 'I expect the stems haven't got the right kind of fluting, then.' 'They look okay, actually.' 'The cap, then, I expect the cap is the wrong colour,' said Twoflower. 'Not sure about that.' 'Well then, why can't you eat them?' Rincewind coughed. It's the little doors and windows,' he said wretchedly, 'it's a dead giveaway.' Thunder rolled across Unseen University. Rain poured over its roofs and gurgled out of its gargoyles, although one or two of the more cunning ones had scuttled off to shelter among the maze of tiles. Far below, in the Great Hall, the eight most powerful wizards on the Discworld gathered at the angles of a ceremonial octogram. Actually they probably weren't the most powerful, if the truth were known, but they certainly had great powers of survival which, in the highly competitive world of magic, was pretty much the same thing. Behind every wizard of the eighth rank were half a dozen eventh rank wizards trying to bump him off, and senior wizards had to develop an inquiring attitude to, for example, scorpions in their bed. An ancient proverb summed it up: when a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life. The oldest wizard, Greyhald Spold of the Ancient and Truly Original Sages of the Unbroken Circle, leaned heavily on his carven staff and spake thusly: 'Get on with it, Weatherwax, my feet are giving me gyp.' Galder, who had merely paused for effect, glared at him. 'Very well, then, I will be brief —' 'Jolly good.' We all sought guidance as to the events of this morning. Can anyone among us say he received it?' The wizards looked sidelong at one another. Nowhere outside a trades union conference fraternal benefit night can so much mutual distrust and suspicion be found as among a gathering of senior enchanters. But the plain fact was that the day had gone very badly. Normally informative demons, summoned abruptly from the Dungeon Dimensions, had looked sheepish and sidled away when questioned. Magic mirrors had cracked. Tarot cards had mysteriously become blank. Crystal balls had gone all cloudy. Even tealeaves, normally scorned by wizards as frivolous and unworthy of contemplation, had clustered together at the bottom of cups and refused to move. In short, the assembled wizards were at a loss. There was a general murmur of agreement. 'And therefore I propose that we perform the Rite of AshkEnte,' said Galder dramatically. He had to admit that he had hoped for a better response, something on the lines of, well, 'No, not the Rite of AshkEnte! Man was not meant to meddle with such things!' In fact there was a general mutter of approval.

[readbookywooks]

. . . looked up. 'Still here, Tryrnon?' 'You summoned me, master,' said Trymon levelly. At least, that's what his voice said. Deep in his grey eyes was the faintest glitter that said he had a list of every slight, every patronising twinkle, every gentle reproof, every knowing glance, and for every single one Galder's living brain was going to spend a year in acid. 'Oh, yes, so I did. Humour the deficiencies of an old man,' said Galder pleasantly. He held up the book he had been reading. 'I don't hold with all this running about,' he said. 'It's all very dramatic, mucking about with magic carpets and the like, but it isn't true magic to my mind. Take seven league boots, now. If men were meant to walk twenty-one miles at a step I am sure God would have given us longer legs . . . Where was I?' 'I am not sure,' said Trymon coldly. 'Ah, yes. Strange that we could find nothing about the Pyramid of Tsort in the Library, you would have thought there'd be something, wouldn't you?' The librarian will be disciplined, of course.' Galder looked sideways at him. 'Nothing drastic,' he said. 'Withold his bananas, perhaps.' They looked at each other for a moment. Galder broke off first – looking hard at Trymon always bothered him. It had the same disconcerting effect as gazing into a mirror and seeing no-one there. 'Anyway,' he said, 'strangely enough, I found assistance elsewhere. In my own modest bookshelves, in fact. The journal of Skrelt Changebasket, the founder of our order. You, my keen young man who would rush off so soon, do you know what happens when a wizard dies?' 'Any spells he has memorised say themselves,' said Trymon. 'It is one of the first things we learn.' 'In fact it is not true of the original Eight Great Spells. By dint of close study Skrelt learned that a Great Spell will simply take refuge in the nearest mind open and ready to receive it. Just push the big mirror over here, will you?' Galder got to his feet and shuffled across to the forge, which was now cold. The strand of magic still writhed, though, at once present and not present, like a slit cut into another universe full of hot blue light. He picked it p easily, took a longbow from a rack, said a word of power, and watched with satisfaction as the magic grasped the ends of the bow and then tightened until the wood creaked. Then lie selected an arrow. Trymon had tugged a heavy, full-length mirror into the middle of the floor. When I am head of the Order, he told himself, I certainly won't shuffle around in carpet slippers. Trymon, as mentioned earlier, felt that a lot could be done by fresh blood if only the dead wood could be removed – but, just for the moment, he was genuinely interested in seeing what the old fool would do next. He may have derived some satisfaction if he had known that Galder and Skrelt Changebasket were both absolutely wrong. Galder made a few passes in front of the glass, which clouded over and then cleared to show an aerial view of the Forest of Skund. He looked at it intently while holding the bow with the arrow pointing vaguely at the ceiling. He muttered a few words like 'allow for wind speed of, say, three knots' and 'adjust for temperature' and then, with a rather disappointing movement, released the arrow. If the laws of action and reaction had anything to do with it, it should have flopped to the ground a few feet away. But no-one was listening to them. With a sound that defies description, but which for the sake of completeness can be thought of basically as 'spang!' plus three days hard work in any decently equipped radiophonic workshop, the arrow vanished. Galder threw the bow aside and grinned. 'Of course, it'll take about an hour to get there,' he said. Then the spell will simply follow the ionised path back here. To me.' 'Remarkable,' said Trymon, but any passing telepath would have read in letters ten yards high: if you, then why not me? He looked down at the cluttered workbench, when a long and very sharp knife looked tailormade for what he suddenly had in mind. Violence was not something he liked to be involved in except at one remove. But the Pyramid of Tsort had been quite clear about the rewards for whoever brought all right spells together at the right time, and Trymon was not about to let years of painstaking work go for nothing because some old fool had a bright idea. 'Would you like some cocoa while we're waiting?' said Galder, hobbling across the room to the servants' bell. 'Certainly,' said Trymon. He picked up the knife, weighing it for balance and accuracy. 'I must congratulate you, master. I can see that we must all get up very early in the morning to get the better of you.' Galder laughed. And the knife left Trymon's hand at such speed that (because of the somewhat sluggish nature of Disc light) it actually grew a bit shorter and a little more massive as it plunged, with unerring aim, towards Galder's neck. It didn't reach it. Instead, it swerved to one side and began a fast orbit – so fast that Galder appeared suddenly to be wearing a metal collar. He turned around, and to Trymon it seemed that he had suddenly grown several feet taller and much more powerful. The knife broke away and shuddered into the door a mere shadow's depth from Trymon's ear. 'Early in the morning?' said Galder pleasantly. 'My dear lad, you will need to stay up all night.' 'Have a bit more table,' said Rincewind. 'No thanks, I don't like marzipan,' said Twoflower. 'Anyway, I'm sure it's not right to eat other people's furniture.' 'Don't worry,' said Swires. The old witch hasn't been seen for years. They say she was done up good and proper by a couple of young tearaways.' 'Kids of today,' commented Rincewind. 'I blame the parents,' said Twoflower. Once you had made the necessary mental adjustments, the gingerbread cottage was quite a pleasant place. Residual magic kept it standing and it was shunned by such local wild animals who hadn't already died of terminal tooth decay. A bright fire of liquorice logs burned rather messily in the fireplace; Rincewind had tried gathering wood outside, but had given up. It's hard to burn wood that talks to you. He belched. 'This isn't very healthy,' he said. 'I mean, why sweets? Why not crispbread and cheese? Or salami, now – I could just do with a nice salami sofa.' 'Search me,' said Swires. 'Old Granny Whitlow just did sweets. You should have seen her meringues —' 'I have,' said Rincewind, 'I looked at the mattresses . . .' 'Gingerbread is more traditional,' said Twoflower. 'What, for mattresses?' 'Don't be silly,' said Twoflower reasonably. Whoever heard of a gingerbread mattress?' Rincewind grunted. He was thinking of food – more accurately, of food in Ankh-Morpork. Funny how the old place seemed more attractive the further he got from it. He only had to close his eyes to picture, in dribbling detail, the food stalls of a hundred different cultures in the market places. You could eat squishi or shark's fin soup so fresh that swimmers wouldn't go near it, and — 'Do you think I could buy this place?' said Twoflower. Rincewind hesitated. He'd found it always paid to think very carefully before answering Twoflower's more surprising questions. 'What for?' he said, cautiously. 'Well, it just reeks of ambience.' 'Oh.' 'What's ambience?' said Swires, sniffing cautiously and wearing the kind of expression that said that he hadn't done it, whatever it was. 'I think it's a kind of frog,' said Rincewind. 'Anyway, you can't buy this place because there isn't anyone to buy t from—' 'I think I could probably arrange that, on behalf of the forest council of course,' interrupted Swires, trying to avoid Rincewind's glare. '— and anyway you couldn't take it with you, I mean, you could hardly pack it in the Luggage, could you?' Rincewind indicated the Luggage, which was lying by the fire and managing in some quite impossible way to look like a contented but alert tiger, and then looked back at Twoflower. His face fell. 'Could you?' he repeated. He had never quite come to terms with the fact that the inside of the Luggage didn't seem to inhabit quite the same world as the outside. Of course, this was simply a byproduct of its essential weirdness, but it was disconcerting to see Twoflower fill it full of dirty shirts and old socks and then open the lid again on a pile of nice crisp laundry, smelling faintly of lavender. Twoflower also bought a lot of quaint native artifacts or, as Rincewind would put it, junk, and even a seven-foot ceremonial pig tickling pole seemed to fit inside quite easily without sticking out anywhere. 'I don't know,' said Twoflower. 'You're a wizard, you know about these things.' 'Yes, well, of course, but baggage magic is a highly specialised art,' said Rincewind. 'Anyway, I'm sure the gnomes wouldn't really want to sell it, it's, it's—,' he groped through what he knew of Twoflower's mad vocabulary – 'it's a tourist attraction.' 'What's that?' said Swires, interestedly. 'It means that lots of people like him will come and look at it,' said Rincewind. 'Why?' 'Because—' Rincewind groped for words – 'it's quaint. Urn, oldey worldey. Folkloresque. Er, a delightful example of a vanished folk art, steeped in the traditions of an age long gone.' 'It is?' said Swires, looking at the cottage in bewilderment. 'Yes.' 'All that?' 'Fraid so.' 'I'll help you pack.' And the night wears on, under a blanket of lowering clouds which covers most of the Disc – which is fortuitous, because when it clears and the astrologers get a good view of the sky they are going to get angry and upset. And in various parts of the forest parties of wizards are getting lost, and going around in circles, and hiding from each other, and getting upset because whenever they bump into a tree it apologises to them. But, unsteadily though it may be, many of them are getting quite close to the cottage . . . Which is a good time to get back to the rambling buildings of Unseen University and in particular the apartments of Greyhald Spold, currently the oldest wizard on the Disc and determined to keep it that way. He has just been extremely surprised and upset. For the last few hours he has been very busy. He may be deaf and a little hard of thinking, but elderly wizards have very well-trained survival instincts, and they know that when a tall figure in a black robe and the latest in agricultural handtools starts looking thoughtfully at you it is time to act fast. The servants have been dismissed. The doorways have been sealed with a paste made from powdered mayflies, and protective octograms have been drawn on the windows. Rare and rather smelly oils have been poured in complex patterns on the floor, in designs which hurt the eyes and suggest the designer was drunk or from some other dimension or, possibly, both; in the very centre of the room is the eightfold octogram of Witholding, surrounded by red and green candles. And in the centre of that is a box made from wood of the curly-fern pine, which grows to a great age, and it is lined with red silk and yet more protective amulets. Because Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place. He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defence against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind. And right beside him, very close to his ear, a voice has just said: DARK IN HERE, ISN'T IT? It began to snow. The barleysugar windows of the cottage showed bright and cheerful against the blackness.