Rincewind carefully tried to balance a large rock on a small pebble. It fell off, but he appeared to be happy with the result.
'Speaking as a poet,' said Conina carefully, 'what would you say about this situation?'
Creosote shifted uneasily. 'Funny old thing, life,' he said.
'Pretty apt.'
Nijel lay back and looked up at the hazy stars. Then he sat bolt upright.
'Did you see that?' he demanded.
'What?'
'It was a sort of flash, a kind of-’
The hubward horizon exploded into a silent flower of colour, which expanded rapidly through all the hues of the conventional spectrum before flashing into brilliant octarine. It etched itself on their eyeballs before fading away.
After a while there was a distant rumble.
'Some sort of magical weapon,' said Conina, blinking. A gust of warm wind picked up the mist and streamed it past them.
'Blow this,' said Nijel, getting to his feet. 'I'm going to wake him up, even if it means we end up carrying him.'
He reached out for Rincewind's shoulder just as something went past very high overhead, making a noise like a flock of geese on nitrous oxide. It disappeared into the desert behind them. Then there was a sound that would have set false teeth on edge, a flash of green light, and a thump.
'I'll wake him up,' said Conina. 'You get the carpet.'
She clambered over the ring of rocks and took the sleeping wizard gently by the arm, and this would have been a textbook way of waking a somnambulist if Rincewind hadn't dropped the rock he was carrying on his foot.
He opened his eyes.
'Where am I?' he said.
'On the beach. You've been ... er ... dreaming.'
Rincewind blinked at the mist, the sky, the circle of stones, Conina, the circle of stones again, and finally back at the sky.
'What's been happening?' he said.
'Some sort of magical fireworks.'
'Oh. It's started, then.'
He lurched unsteadily out of the circle, in a way that suggested to Conina that perhaps he wasn't quite awake yet, and staggered back towards the remains of the fire. He walked a few steps and then appeared to remember something.
He looked down at his foot, and said, 'Ow.'
He'd almost reached the fire when the blast from the last spell reached them. It had been aimed at the tower in Al Khali, which was twenty miles away, and by now the wavefront was extremely diffuse. It was hardly affecting the nature of things as it surged over the dunes with a faint sucking noise; the fire burned red and green for a second, one of Nijel's sandals turned into a small and irritated badger, and a pigeon flew out of the Seriph's turban.
Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.
'What was that?' said Nijel. He kicked the badger, who was sniffing at his foot.
'Hmm?' said Rincewind.
'That!'
'Oh, that,' said Rincewind. 'Just the backwash of a spell. They probably hit the tower in Al Khali.'
'It must have been pretty big to affect us here.'
'It probably was.'
'Hey, that was my palace,' said Creosote weakly. 'I mean, I know it was a lot, but it was all I had.'
'Sorry.'
'But there were people in the city!'
They're probably all right,' said Rincewind.
'Good.'
'Whatever they are.'
'What?'
Conina grabbed his arm. 'Don't shout at him,' she said. 'He's not himself.'
Ah,' said Creosote dourly, 'an improvement.'
'I say, that's a bit unfair,' Nijel protested. 'I mean, he got me out of the snake pit and, well, he knows a lot-’
'Yes, wizards are good at getting you out of the sort of trouble that only wizards can get you into,' said Creosote. 'Then they expect you to thank them.'
'Oh, I think-’
'It's got to be said,' said Creosote, waving his hands irritably. He was briefly illuminated by the passage of another spell across the tormented sky.
'Look at that!' he snapped. 'Oh, he means well. They all mean well. They probably all think the Disc would be a better place if they were in charge. Take it from me, there's nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favour. Wizards! When all's said and done, what good are they? I mean, can you name me something worthwhile any wizard's done?'
'I think that's a bit cruel,' said Conina, but with an edge in her voice that suggested that she could be open to persuasion on the subject.
'Well, they make me sick,' muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn't like it much.
'I think we'll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,' said Nijel diplomatically. 'Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.'
'My mouth feels all horrible, too,' muttered Creosote, determined to cling on to the remnant of his anger.
Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.
'He's gone!'
In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.
He hadn't wanted much, ever. He'd stuck with wizardry even though he wasn't any good at it, he'd always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he'd show them. Precisely who "they" were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.
He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.
The Luggage was having problems of its own.
The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another's clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.
Here is what it looked like.
It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.
Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn't know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallising on its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-coloured corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.
It was hot and stuffy inside the tower. There were no internal floors, just a series of walkways around the walls. They were lined with wizards, and the central space was a column of octarine light that creaked loudly as they poured their power into it. At its base stood Abrim, the octarine gems on the hat blazing so brightly that they looked more like holes cut through into a different universe where, in defiance of probability, they had come out inside a sun.
The vizier stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes shut, mouth a thin line of concentration, balancing the forces. Usually a wizard could control power only to the extent of his own physical capability, but Abrim was learning fast.
You made yourself the pinch in the hourglass, the fulcrum on the balance, the roll around the sausage.
Do it right and you were the power, it was part of you and you were capable of-
Has it been pointed out that his feet were several inches off the ground? His feet were several inches off the ground.
Abrim was pulling together the potency for a spell that would soar away into the sky and beset the Ankh tower with a thousand screaming demons when there came a thunderous knock at the door.
There is a mantra to be said on these occasions. It doesn't matter if the door is a tent flap, a scrap of hide on a wind-blown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a sma
ll light over it made of horrible bits of coloured glass and a bellpush that plays a choice of twenty popular melodies that no music lover would want to listen to even after five years' sensory deprivation.
One wizard turned to another and duly said: 'I wonder who that can be at this time of night?'
There was another series of thumps on the woodwork.
'There can't be anyone alive out there,' said the other wizard, and he said it nervously, because if you ruled out the possibility of it being anyone alive that always left the suspicion that perhaps it was someone dead.
This time the banging rattled the hinges.
'One of us had better go out,' said the first wizard.
'Good man.'
'Ah. Oh. Right.'
He set off slowly down the short, arched passage.
'I'll just go and see who it is, then?' he said.
'First class.'
It was a strange figure that made its hesitant way to the door. Ordinary robes weren't sufficient protection in the high-energy field inside tower, and over his brocade and velvet the wizard wore a thick, padded overall stuffed with rowan shavings and embroidered with industrial-grade sigils. He'd affixed a smoked glass visor to his pointy hat and his gauntlets, which were extremely big, suggested that he was a wicket keeper in a game of cricket played at supersonic speeds. The actinic flashes and pulsations from the great work in the main hall cast harsh shadows around him as he fumbled for the bolts.
He pulled down the visor and opened the door a fraction.
'We don't want any-’ he began, and ought to have chosen his words better, because they were his epitaph.
It was sometime before his colleague noticed his continued absence, and wandered down the passage to find him. The door had been thrown wide open, the thaumatic inferno outside roaring against the web of spells that held it in check. In fact the door hadn't been pushed completely back; he pulled it aside to see why, and gave a little whimper.
There was a noise behind him. He turned around.
'Wha-’ he began, which is a pretty poor syllable on which to end a life.
High over the Circle Sea Rincewind was feeling a bit of an idiot.
This happens to everyone sooner or later.
For example, in a tavern someone jogs your elbow and you turn around quickly and give a mouthful of abuse to, you become slowly aware, the belt buckle of a man who, it turns out, was probably hewn rather than born.
Or a little car runs into the back of yours and you rush out to show a bunch of fives to the driver who, it becomes apparent as he goes on unfolding more body like some horrible conjuring trick, must have been sitting on the back seat.
Or you might be leading your mutinous colleagues to the captain's cabin and you hammer on the door and he sticks his great head out with a cutlass in either hand and you say 'We're taking over the ship, you scum, and the lads are right with me!' and he says 'What lads?' and you suddenly feel a great emptiness behind you and you say 'Um ...'
In other words, it's the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek.
Rincewind was still angry and humiliated and so forth, but these emotions had died down a bit and something of his normal character had reasserted itself. It was not very pleased to find itself on a few threads of blue and gold wool high above the phosphorescent waves.
He'd been heading for Ankh-Morpork. He tried to remember why.
Of course, it was where it had all started. Perhaps it was the presence of the University, which was so heavy with magic it lay like a cannonball on the incontinence blanket of the Universe, stretching reality very thin. Ankh was where things started, and finished.
It was also his home, such as it was, and it called to him.
It has already been indicated that Rincewind appeared to have a certain amount of rodent in his ancestry, and in times of stress he felt an overpowering urge to make a run for his burrow.
He let the carpet drift for a while on the air currents while dawn, which Creosote would probably have referred to as pink-fingered, made a ring of fire around the edge of the Disc. It spread its lazy light over a world that was subtly different.
Rincewind blinked. There was a weird light. No, now he came to think about it, not weird but wyrd, which was much weirder. It was like looking at the world through a heat haze, but a haze that had a sort of life of its own. It danced and stretched, and gave more than a hint that it wasn't just an optical illusion but that it was reality itself that was being tensed and distended, like a rubber balloon trying to contain too much gas.
The wavering was greatest in the direction of Ankh-Morpork, where flashes and fountains of tortured air indicated that the struggle hadn't abated. A similar column hung over Al Khali, and then Rincewind realised that it wasn't the only one.
Wasn't that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened on to the great Rim Ocean? And there were others.
It had all gone critical. Wizardry was breaking up. Goodbye to the University, the levels, the Orders; deep in his heart, every wizard knew that the natural unit of wizardry was one wizard. The towers would multiply and fight until there was one tower left, and then the wizards would fight until there was one wizard.
By then, he'd probably fight himself.
The whole edifice that operated as the balance wheel of magic was falling to bits. Rincewind resented that, deeply. He'd never been any good at magic, but that wasn't the point. He knew where he fitted. It was right at the bottom, but at least he fitted. He could look up and see the whole delicate machine ticking away, gently, browsing off the natural magic generated by the turning of the Disc.
All he had was nothing, but that was something, and now it had been taken away.
Rincewind turned the carpet until it was facing the distant gleam that was Ankh-Morpork, which was a brilliant speck in the early morning light, and a part of his mind that wasn't doing anything else wondered why it was so bright. There also seemed to be a full moon, and even Rincewind, whose grasp of natural philosophy was pretty vague, was sure there had been one of those only the other day.
Well, it didn't matter. He'd had enough. He wasn't going to try to understand anything any more. He was going home.
Except that wizards can never go home.
This is one of the ancient and deeply meaningful sayings about wizards and it says something about most of them that they have never been able to work out what it means. Wizards aren't allowed to have wives but they are allowed to have parents, and many of them go back to the old home town for Hogswatch Night or Soul Cake Thursday, for a bit of a singsong and the heart-warming sight of all their boyhood bullies hurriedly avoiding them in the street.
It's rather like the other saying they've never been able to understand, which is that you can't cross the same river twice. Experiments with a long-legged wizard and a small river say you can cross the same river thirty, thirty-five times a minute.
Wizards don't like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like 'cl'.
In this particular case, though, Rincewind couldn't go home because it actually wasn't there any more. There was a city straddling the river Ankh, but it wasn't one he'd ever seen before; it was white and clean and didn't smell like a privy full of dead herrings.
He landed in what had once been the Plaza of Broken Moons, and also in a state of some shock. There were fountains. There had been fountains before, of course, but they had oozed rather than played and they had looked like thin soup. There were milky flagstones underfoot, with little glittery bits in. And, although the sun was sitting on the horizon like half a breakfast grapefruit, there was hardly anyone around. Normally Ankh was permanently crowded, the actual shade of the sky being a mere background detail.
Smoke drifted over the city in long greasy coils from the crown of boiling air above the Unive
rsity. It was the only movement, apart from the fountains.
Rincewind had always been rather proud of the fact that he always felt alone, even in the teeming city, but it was even worse being alone when he was by himself.
He rolled up the carpet and slung it over one shoulder and padded through the haunted streets towards the University.
The gates hung open to the wind. Most of the building looked half ruined by misses and ricochets. The tower of sourcery, far too high to be real, seemed to be unscathed. Not so the old Tower of Art. Half the magic aimed at the tower next door seemed to have rebounded on it. Parts of it had melted and started to run; some parts glowed, some parts had crystallised, a few parts seemed to have twisted partly out of the normal three dimensions. It made you feel sorry even for stone that it should have to undergo such treatment. In fact nearly everything had happened to the tower except actual collapse. It looked so beaten that possibly even gravity had given up on it.
Rincewind sighed, and padded around the base of the tower towards the Library.
Towards where the Library had been.
There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.
Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.
Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of a bookcase still smouldered.
Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backwards and forwards across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.
They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.
Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.
The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.
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