“Yes? You want something?” he said to one of the star men, who had gripped his arm.
“All books of magic must be burned,” said the man, but a little uncertainly, because something about Cohen’s teeth was giving him a nasty feeling of sanity.
“Why?” said Cohen.
“It has been revealed to us.” Now Cohen’s smile was as wide as all outdoors, and rather more dangerous.
“I think we ought to be getting along,” said Lackjaw nervously. A party of star people had turned into the street behind them.
“I think I would like to kill someone,” said Cohen, still smiling.
“The star directs that the Disc must be cleansed,” said the man, backing away.
“Stars can’t talk,” said Cohen, drawing his sword.
“If you kill me a thousand will take my place,” said the man, who was now backed against the wall.
“Yes,” said Cohen, in a reasonable tone of voice, “but that isn’t the point, is it? The point is, you’ll be dead.”
The man’s Adam’s apple began to bob like a yo-yo. He squinted down at Cohen’s sword.
“There is that, yes,” he conceded. “Tell you what—how about if we put the fire out?”
“Good idea,” said Cohen.
Lackjaw tugged at his belt. The other star people were running toward them. There were a lot of them, many of them were armed, and it began to look as though things would become a little more serious.
Cohen waved his sword at them defiantly, and turned and ran. Even Lackjaw had difficulty in keeping up.
“Funny,” he gasped, as they plunged down another alley, “I thought—for a minute—you’d want to stand—and fight them.”
“Blow that—for a—lark.”
As they came out into the light at the other end of the alley Cohen flung himself against the wall, drew his sword, stood with his head on one side as he judged the approaching footsteps, and then brought the blade around in a dead flat sweep at stomach height. There was an unpleasant noise and several screams, but by then Cohen was well away up the street, moving in the unusual shambling run that spared his bunions.
With Lackjaw pounding along grimly beside him he turned off into an inn painted with red stars, jumped onto a table with only a faint whimper of pain, ran along it—while, with almost perfect choreography, Lackjaw ran straight underneath without ducking—jumped down at the other end, kicked his way through the kitchens, and came out into another alley.
They scurried around a few more turnings and piled into a doorway. Cohen clung to the wall and wheezed until the little blue and purple lights went away.
“Well,” he panted, “what did you get?”
“Um, the cruet,” said Lackjaw.
“Just that?”
“Well, I had to go under the table, didn’t I? You didn’t do so well yourself.”
Cohen looked disdainfully at the small melon he had managed to skewer in his flight.
“This must be pretty tough here,” he said, biting through the rind.
“Want some salt on it?” said the dwarf.
Cohen said nothing. He just stood holding the melon, with his mouth open.
Lackjaw looked around. The cul-de-sac they were in was empty, except for an old box someone had left against a wall.
Cohen was staring at it. He handed the melon to the dwarf without looking at him and walked out into the sunlight. Lackjaw watched him creep stealthily around the box, or as stealthily as is possible with joints that creaked like a ship under full sail, and prod it once or twice with his sword, but very gingerly, as if he half expected it to explode.
“It’s just a box,” the dwarf called out. “What’s so special about a box?”
Cohen said nothing. He squatted down painfully and peered closely at the lock on the lid.
“What’s in it?” said Lackjaw.
“You wouldn’t want to know,” said Cohen. “Help me up, will you?”
“Yes, but this box—”
“This box,” said Cohen, “this box is—” he waved his arms vaguely.
“Oblong?”
“Eldritch,” said Cohen mysteriously.
“Eldritch?”
“Yup.”
“Oh,” said the dwarf. They stood looking at the box for a moment.
“Cohen?”
“Yes?”
“What does eldritch mean?”
“Well, eldritch is—” Cohen paused and looked down irritably. “Give it a kick and you’ll see.”
Lockjaw’s steel-capped dwarfboot whammed into the side of the box. Cohen flinched. Nothing else happened.
“I see,” said the dwarf. “Eldritch means wooden?”
“No,” said Cohen. “It—it oughtn’t to have done that.”
“I see,” said Lackjaw, who didn’t, and was beginning to wish Cohen hadn’t gone out into all this hot sunlight. “It ought to have run away, you think?”
“Yes. Or bitten your leg off.”
“Ah,” said the dwarf. He took Cohen gently by the arm. “It’s nice and shady over here,” he said. “Why don’t you just have a little—”
Cohen shook him off.
“It’s watching that wall,” he said. “Look, that’s why it’s not taking any notice of us. It’s staring at the wall.”
“Yes, that’s right,” said Lackjaw soothingly. “Of course it’s watching that wall with its little eyes—”
“Don’t be an idiot, it hasn’t got any eyes,” snapped Cohen.
“Sorry, sorry,” said Lackjaw hurriedly. “It’s watching the wall without eyes, sorry.”
“I think it’s worried about something,” said Cohen.
“Well, it would be, wouldn’t it,” said Lackjaw. “I expect it just wants us to go off somewhere and leave it alone.”
“I think it’s very puzzled,” Cohen added.
“Yes, it certainly looks puzzled,” said the dwarf. Cohen glared at him.
“How can you tell?” he snapped.
It struck Lackjaw that the roles were unfairly reversing. He looked from Cohen to the box, his mouth opening and shutting.
“How can you tell?” he said. But Cohen wasn’t listening anyway. He sat down in front of the box, assuming that the bit with the keyhole was the front, and watched it intently. Lackjaw backed away. Funny, said his mind, but the damn thing is looking at me.
“All right,” said Cohen, “I know you and me don’t see eye to eye, but we’re all trying to find someone we care for, okay?”
“I’m—” said Lackjaw, and realized that Cohen was talking to the box.
“So tell me where they’ve gone.”
As Lackjaw looked on in horror the Luggage extended its little legs, braced itself, and ran full tilt at the nearest wall. Clay bricks and dusty mortar exploded around it.
Cohen peered through the hole. There was a small grubby storeroom on the other side. The Luggage stood in the middle of the floor, radiating extreme bafflement.
“Shop!” said Twoflower.
“Anyone here?” said Bethan.
“Urrgh,” said Rincewind.
“I think we ought to sit him down somewhere and get him a glass of water,” said Twoflower. “If there’s one here.”
“There’s everything else,” said Bethan.
The room was full of shelves, and the shelves were full of everything. Things that couldn’t be accommodated on them hung in bunches from the dark and shadowy ceiling; boxes and sacks of everything spilled onto the floor.
There was no sound from outside. Bethan looked around and found out why.
“I’ve never seen so much stuff,” said Twoflower.
“There’s one thing it’s out of stock of,” said Bethan, firmly.
“How can you tell?”
“You just have to look. It’s fresh out of exits.”
Twoflower turned around. Where the door and window had been there were shelves stacked with boxes; they looked as though they had been there for a long time.
Twoflo
wer sat Rincewind down on a rickety chair by the counter and poked doubtfully at the shelves. There were boxes of nails, and hairbrushes. There were bars of soap, faded with age. There was a stack of jars containing deliquescent bath salts, to which someone had fixed a rather sad and jaunty little notice announcing, in the face of all the evidence, that one would make an Ideal Gift. There was also quite a lot of dust.
Bethan peered at the shelves on the other wall, and laughed.
“Would you look at this!” she said.
Twoflower looked. She was holding a—well, it was a little mountain chalet, but with seashells stuck all over it, and then the perpetrator had written “A Special Souvenir” in pokerwork on the roof (which, of course, opened so that cigarettes could be kept in it, and played a tinny little tune).
“Have you ever seen anything like it?” she said.
Twoflower shook his head. His mouth dropped open.
“Are you all right?” said Bethan.
“I think it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
There was a whirring noise overhead. They looked up.
A big black globe had lowered itself from the darkness of the ceiling. Little red lights flashed on and off on it, and as they stared it spun around and looked at them with a big glass eye. It was menacing, that eye. It seemed to suggest very emphatically that it was watching something distasteful.
“Hallo?” said Twoflower.
A head appeared over the edge of the counter. It looked angry.
“I hope you were intending to pay for that,” it said nastily. Its expression suggested that it expected Rincewind to say yes, and that it wouldn’t believe him.
“This?” said Bethan. “I wouldn’t buy this if you threw in a hatful of rubies and—”
“I’ll buy it. How much?” said Twoflower urgently, reaching into his pockets. His face fell.
“Actually, I haven’t got any money,” he said. “It’s in my Luggage, but I—”
There was a snort. The head disappeared from behind the counter, and reappeared from behind a display of toothbrushes.
It belonged to a very small man almost hidden behind a green apron. He seemed very upset.
“No money?” he said. “You come into my shop—”
“We didn’t mean to,” said Twoflower quickly. “We didn’t notice it was there.”
“It wasn’t,” said Bethan firmly. “It’s magical, isn’t it?”
The small shopkeeper hesitated.
“Yes,” he reluctantly agreed. “A bit.”
“A bit?” said Bethan. “A bit magical?”
“Quite a bit, then,” he conceded, backing away, and, “All right,” he agreed, as Bethan continued to glare at him. “It’s magical. I can’t help it. The bloody door hasn’t been and gone again, has it?”
“Yes, and we’re not happy about that thing in the ceiling.”
He looked up, and frowned. Then he disappeared through a little beaded doorway half-hidden among the merchandise. There was a lot of clanking and whirring, and the black globe disappeared into the shadows. It was replaced by, in succession, a bunch of herbs, a mobile advertising something Twoflower had never heard of but which was apparently a bedtime drink, a suit of armor and a stuffed crocodile with a lifelike expression of extreme pain and surprise.
The shopkeeper reappeared.
“Better?” he demanded.
“It’s an improvement,” said Twoflower, doubtfully. “I liked the herbs best.”
At this point Rincewind groaned. He was about to wake up.
There have been three general theories put forward to explain the phenomenon of the wandering shops or, as they are generically known, tabernae vagantes.
The first postulates that many thousands of years ago there evolved somewhere in the multiverse a race whose single talent was to buy cheap and sell dear. Soon they controlled a vast galactic empire or, as they put it, Emporium, and the more advanced members of the species found a way to equip their very shops with unique propulsion units that could break the dark walls of space itself and open up vast new markets. And long after the worlds of the Emporium perished in the heat death of their particular universe, after one last defiant fire sale, the wandering starshops still ply their trade, eating their way through the pages of spacetime like a worm through a three-volume novel.
The second is that they are the creation of a sympathetic Fate, charged with the role of supplying exactly the right thing at the right time.
The third is that they are simply a very clever way of getting around the various Sunday Closing acts.
All these theories, diverse as they are, have two things in common. They explain the observed facts, and they are completely and utterly wrong.
Rincewind opened his eyes and lay for a moment looking up at the stuffed reptile. It was not the best thing to see when awakening from troubled dreams…
Magic! So that’s what it felt like! No wonder wizards didn’t have much truck with sex!
Rincewind knew what orgasms were, of course, he’d had a few in his time, sometimes even in company, but nothing in his experience even approximated to that tight, hot moment when every nerve in his body streamed with blue-white fire and raw magic had blazed forth from his fingers. It filled you and lifted you and you surfed down the rising, curling wave of elemental force. No wonder wizards fought for power…
And so on. The Spell in his head had been doing it, though, not Rincewind. He was really beginning to hate that Spell. He was sure that if it hadn’t frightened away all the other spells he’d tried to learn he could have been a decent wizard in his own right.
Somewhere in Rincewind’s battered soul the worm of rebellion flashed a fang.
Right, he thought. You’re going back into the Octavo, first chance I get.
He sat up.
“Where the hell is this?” he said, grabbing his head to stop it exploding.
“A shop,” said Twoflower mournfully.
“I hope it sells knives because I think I’d like to cut my head off,” said Rincewind. Something about the expression of the two opposite him sobered him up.
“That was a joke,” he said. “Mainly a joke, anyway. Why are we in this shop?”
“We can’t get out,” said Bethan.
“The door’s disappeared,” added Twoflower helpfully.
Rincewind stood up, a little shakily.
“Oh,” he said. “One of those shops?”
“All right,” said the shopkeeper testily. “It’s magical, yes, it moves around, yes, no, I’m not telling you why—”
“Can I have a drink of water, please?” said Rincewind.
The shopkeeper looked affronted.
“First no money, then they want a glass of water,” he snapped. “That’s just about—”
Bethan snorted and strode across to the little man, who tried to back away. He was too late.
She picked him up by his apron straps and glared at him eye to eye. Torn though her dress was, disarrayed though her hair was, she became for a moment the symbol of every woman who has caught a man with his thumb on the scales of life.
“Time is money,” she hissed. “I’ll give you thirty seconds to get him a glass of water. I think that’s a bargain, don’t you?”
“I say,” Twoflower whispered. “She’s a real terror when she’s roused, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Rincewind, without enthusiasm.
“All right, all right,” said the shopkeeper, visibly cowed.
“And then you can let us out,” Bethan added.
“That’s fine by me, I wasn’t open for business anyway, I just stopped for a few seconds to get my bearings and you barged in!”
He grumbled off through the bead curtains and returned with a cup of water.
“I washed it out special,” he said, avoiding Bethan’s gaze.
Rincewind looked at the liquid in the cup. It had probably been clean before it was poured in, now drinking it would be genocide for thousands of inno
cent germs.
He put it down carefully.
“Now I’m going to have a good wash!” stated Bethan, and stalked off through the curtain.
The shopkeeper waved a hand vaguely and looked appealingly at Rincewind and Twoflower.
“She’s not bad,” said Twoflower. “She’s going to marry a friend of ours.”
“Does he know?”
“Things not so good in the starshop business?” said Rincewind, as sympathetically as he could manage.
The little man shuddered. “You wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “I mean, you learn not to expect much, you make a sale here and there, it’s a living, you know what I mean? But these people you’ve got these days, the ones with these star things painted on their faces, well, I hardly have time to open the store and they’re threatening to burn it down. Too magical, they say. So I say, of course magical, what else?”
“Are there a lot of them about, then?” said Rincewind.
“All over the Disc, friend. Don’t ask me why.”
“They believe a star is going to crash into the Disc,” said Rincewind.
“Is it?”
“Lots of people think so.”
“That’s a shame. I’ve done good business here. Too magical, they say! What’s wrong with magic, that’s what I’d like to know?”
“What will you do?” said Twoflower.
“Oh, go to some other universe, there’s plenty around,” said the shopkeeper airily. “Thanks for telling me about the star, though. Can I drop you off somewhere?”
The Spell gave Rincewind’s mind a kick.
“Er, no,” he said, “I think perhaps we’d better stay. To see it through, you know.”
“You’re not worried about this star thing, then?”
“The star is life, not death,” said Rincewind.
“How’s that?”
“How’s what?”
“You did it again!” said Twoflower, pointing an accusing finger. “You say things and then don’t know you’ve said them!”
“I just said we’d better stay,” said Rincewind.
“You said the star was life, not death,” said Twoflower. “Your voice went all crackly and far away. Didn’t it?” He turned to the shopkeeper for confirmation.
Discworld 02 - The Light Fantastic Page 10