* * *
The fire, driven by the wind, spread out from the Drum faster than a man could walk. The timbers of the Widdershin Gate were already on fire when Rincewind, his face blistered and reddened from the flames, reached them. By now he and Twoflower were on horseback—mounts hadn’t been that hard to obtain. A wily merchant had asked fifty times their worth, and had been left gaping when one thousand times their worth had been pressed into his hands.
They rode through just before the first of the big gate timbers descended in an explosion of sparks. Morpork was already a cauldron of flame.
As they galloped up the red-lit road Rincewind glanced sideways at his travelling companion, currently trying hard to learn to ride a horse.
‘Bloody hell,’ he thought. ‘He’s alive! Me too. Who’d have thought it? Perhaps there is something in this reflected-sound-of-underground-spirits?’ It was a cumbersome phrase. Rincewind tried to get his tongue round the thick syllables that were the word in Twoflower’s own language.
‘Ecolirix?’ he tried. ‘Ecro-gnothics? Echo-gnomics?’
That would do. That sounded about right.
* * *
Several hundred yards downriver from the last smouldering suburb of the city a strangely rectangular and apparently heavily waterlogged object touched the mud on the widdershin bank. Immediately it sprouted numerous legs and scrabbled for a purchase.
Hauling itself to the top of the bank the Luggage—streaked with soot, stained with water and very, very angry—shook itself and took its bearings. Then it moved away at a brisk trot, the small and incredibly ugly imp that was perching on its lid watching the scenery with interest.
* * *
Bravd looked at the Weasel and raised his eyebrows.
‘And that’s it,’ said Rincewind. ‘The Luggage caught up with us, don’t ask me how. Is there any more wine?’
The Weasel picked up the empty wineskin.
‘I think you have had just about enough wine this night,’ he said.
Bravd’s forehead wrinkled.
‘Gold is gold,’ he said finally. ‘How can a man with plenty of gold consider himself poor? You’re either poor or rich. It stands to reason.’
Rincewind hiccupped. He was finding Reason rather difficult to hold on to. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘what I think is, the point is, well, you know octiron?’
The two adventurers nodded. The strange iridescent metal was almost as highly valued in the lands around the Circle Sea as sapient pearwood, and was about as rare. A man who owned a needle made of octiron would never lose his way, since it always pointed to the Hub of the discworld, being acutely sensitive to the disc’s magical field; it would also miraculously darn his socks.
‘Well, my point is, you see, that gold also has its sort of magical field. Sort of financial wizardry. Echo-gnomics.’ Rincewind giggled.
The Weasel stood up and stretched. The sun was well up now, and the city below them was wreathed in mists and full of foul vapours. Also gold, he decided. Even a citizen of Morpork would, at the very point of death, desert his treasure to save his skin. Time to move.
The little man called Twoflower appeared to be asleep. The Weasel looked down at him and shook his head.
‘The city awaits, such as it is,’ he said. ‘Thank you for a pleasant tale, Wizard. What will you do now?’ He eyed the Luggage, which immediately backed away and snapped its lid at him.
‘Well, there are no ships leaving the city now,’ giggled Rincewind. ‘I suppose we’ll take the coast road to Chirm. I’ve got to look after him, you see. But look, I didn’t make it—’
‘Sure, sure,’ said the Weasel soothingly. He turned away and swung himself into the saddle of the horse that Bravd was holding. A few moments later the two heroes were just specks under a cloud of dust, heading down towards the charcoal city.
Rincewind stared muzzily at the recumbent tourist. At two recumbent tourists. In his somewhat defenceless state a stray thought, wandering through the dimensions in search of a mind to harbour it, slid into his brain.
‘Here’s another fine mess you’ve got me into,’ he moaned, and slumped backwards.{18}
* * *
‘Mad,’ said the Weasel. Bravd, galloping along a few feet away, nodded.
‘All wizards get like that,’ he said. ‘It’s the quicksilver fumes. Rots their brains. Mushrooms, too.’
‘However—’ said the brown-clad one. He reached into his tunic and took out a golden disc on a short chain. Bravd raised his eyebrows.
‘The wizard said that the little man had some sort of golden disc that told him the time,’ said the Weasel.
‘Arousing your cupidity, little friend? You always were an expert thief, Weasel.’
‘Aye,’ agreed the Weasel modestly. He touched the knob at the disc’s rim, and it flipped open.
The very small demon imprisoned within looked up from its tiny abacus and scowled. ‘It lacks but ten minutes to eight of the clock,’ it snarled. The lid slammed shut, almost trapping the Weasel’s fingers.
With an oath the Weasel hurled the time-teller far out into the heather, where it possibly hit a stone. Something, in any event, caused the case to split; there was a vivid octarine flash and a whiff of brimstone as the time being vanished into whatever demonic dimension it called home.
‘What did you do that for?’ said Bravd, who hadn’t been close enough to hear the words.
‘Do what?’ said the Weasel. ‘I didn’t do anything. Nothing happened at all. Come on—we’re wasting opportunities!’
Bravd nodded. Together they turned their steeds and galloped towards ancient Ankh, and honest enchantments.
* * *
The Sending of Eight
Prologue
The discworld offers sights far more impressive than those found in universes built by Creators with less imagination but more mechanical aptitude.
Although the disc’s sun is but an orbiting moonlet, its prominences hardly bigger than croquet hoops, this slight drawback must be set against the tremendous sight of Great A’Tuin the Turtle, upon Whose ancient and meteor-riddled shell the disc ultimately rests. Sometimes, in His slow journey across the shores of Infinity, He moves His country-sized head to snap at a passing comet.
But perhaps the most impressive sight of all—if only because most brains, when faced with the sheer galactic enormity of A’Tuin, refuse to believe it—is the endless Rimfall, where the seas of the disc boil ceaselessly over the Edge into space. Or perhaps it is the Rimbow, the eight-coloured, world-girdling rainbow that hovers in the mist-laden air over the Fall. The eighth colour is octarine, caused by the scatter-effect of strong sunlight on an intense magical field.
Or perhaps, again, the most magnificent sight is the Hub. There, a spire of green ice ten miles high rises through the clouds and supports at its peak the realm of Dunmanifestin,{20} the abode of the disc gods. The disc gods themselves, despite the splendour of the world below them, are seldom satisfied. It is embarrassing to know that one is a god of a world that only exists because every improbability curve must have its far end; especially when one can peer into other dimensions at worlds whose Creators had more mechanical aptitude than imagination. No wonder, then, that the disc gods spend more time in bickering than in omnicognizance.
On this particular day Blind Io, by dint of constant vigilance the chief of the gods, sat with his chin on his hand and looked at the gaming board on the red marble table in front of him. Blind Io had got his name because, where his eye sockets should have been, there were nothing but two areas of blank skin. His eyes, of which he had an impressively large number, led a semi-independent life of their own. Several were currently hovering above the table.
The gaming board was a carefully-carved map of the disc world, overprinted with squares. A number of beautifully modelled playing pieces were now occupying some of the squares. A human onlooker would, for example, have recognised in two of them the likenesses of Bravd and the Weasel. Others represented yet more h
eroes and champions, of which the disc had a more than adequate supply.
Still in the game were Io, Offler the Crocodile God, Zephyrus the god of slight breezes,{21} Fate, and the Lady. There was an air of concentration around the board now that the lesser players had been removed from the Game. Chance had been an early casualty, running her hero into a full house of armed gnolls [10] and shortly afterwards Night has cashed his chips, pleading an appointment with Destiny. Several minor deities had drifted up and were kibitzing over the shoulders of the players.
Side bets were made that the Lady would be the next to leave the board. Her last champion of any standing was now a pinch of potash in the ruins of still-smoking Ankh-Morpork, and there were hardly any pieces that she could promote to first rank.
Blind Io took up the dice-box, which was a skull whose various orifices had been stoppered with rubies, and with several of his eyes on the Lady he rolled three fives.
She smiled. This was the nature of the Lady’s eyes: they were bright green, lacking iris or pupil, and they glowed from within.
The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one God, craned forward to peer at them.
‘A wenegad wiffard and fome fort of clerk,’ said Offler the Crocodile God, hindered as usual by his tusks. ‘Well, weally!’ With one claw he pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the centre of the table.
The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dice-cup and held it as steady as a rock, yet all the Gods could hear the three cubes rattling about inside. And then she sent them bouncing across the table.
A six. A three. A five.
Something was happening to the five, however. Battered by the chance collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun gently and came down a seven.
Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides.
‘Come on,’ he said wearily. ‘Play fair.’
The Sending of Eight{19}
The road from Ankh-Morpork to Chirm is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than useful.
Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard [11]. It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant—he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word—that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant ‘idiot’.
As they rode leisurely through the thyme-scented, bee-humming air, Rincewind pondered on the experiences of the last few days. While the little foreigner was obviously insane, he was also generous and considerably less lethal than half the people the wizard had mixed with in the city. Rincewind rather liked him. Disliking him would be like kicking a puppy.
Currently Twoflower was showing a great interest in the theory and practice of magic.
‘It all seems, well, rather useless to me,’ he said. ‘I always thought that, you know, a wizard just said the magic words and that was that. Not all this tedious memorising.’
Rincewind agreed moodily. He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears.
He went on to add that some of the ancient magic could still be found in its raw state, recognisable—to the initiated—by the eightfold shape it made in the crystalline structure of space-time. There was the metal octiron, for example, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous amounts of raw enchantment.
‘It’s all very depressing,’ he finished.
‘Depressing?’
Rincewind turned in his saddle and glanced at Twoflower’s Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs, occasionally snapping its lid at butterflies. He sighed.
‘Rincewind thinks he ought to be able to harness the lightning,’ said the picture-imp, who was observing the passing scene from the tiny doorway of the box slung around Twoflower’s neck. He had spent the morning painting picturesque views and quaint scenes for his master, and had been allowed to knock off for a smoke.
‘When I said harness I didn’t mean harness,’ snapped Rincewind. ‘I meant, well, I just meant that—I dunno, I just can’t think of the right words. I just think the world ought to be more sort of organised.’
‘That’s just fantasy,’ said Twoflower.
‘I know. That’s the trouble.’ Rincewind sighed again. It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.
There was a faint sound, hardly louder than the noise of the bees in the rosemary by the road. It had a curiously bony quality, as of rolling skulls or a whirling dicebox. Rincewind peered around. There was no-one nearby.
For some reason that worried him.
Then came a slight breeze, that grew and went in the space of a few heartbeats. It left the world unchanged save in a few interesting particulars.
There was now, for example, a five-metre tall mountain troll standing in the road. It was exceptionally angry. This was partly because trolls generally are, in any case, but it was exacerbated by the fact that the sudden and instantaneous teleportation from its lair in the Rammerorck Mountains three thousand miles away and a thousand yards closer to the Rim had raised its internal temperature to a dangerous level, in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy. So it bared its fangs and charged.
‘What a strange creature,’ Twoflower remarked. ‘Is it dangerous?’
‘Only to people!’ shouted Rincewind. He drew his sword and, with a smooth overarm throw, completely failed to hit the troll. The blade plunged on into the heather at the side of the track.
There was the faintest of sounds, like the rattle of old teeth.
The sword struck a boulder concealed in the heather—concealed, a watcher might have considered, so artfully that a moment before it had not appeared to be there at all. It sprang up like a leaping salmon and in mid-ricochet plunged deeply into the back of the troll’s grey neck.
The creature grunted, and with one swipe of a claw gouged a wound in the flank of Twoflower’s horse, which screamed and bolted into the trees at the roadside. The troll spun around and made a grab for Rincewind.
Then its sluggish nervous system brought it the message that it was dead. It looked surprised for a moment, and then toppled over and shattered into gravel [12].
‘Aaargh,’ thought Rincewind as his horse reared in terror. He hung on desperately as it staggered two-legged across the road and then, screaming, turned and galloped into the woods.
The sound of hoofbeats died away, leaving the air to the hum of bees and the occasional rustle of butterfly wings. There was another sound, too, a strange noise for the bright time of noonday.
It sounded like dice.
‘Rincewind?’
The long aisles of trees
threw Twoflower’s voice from side to side and eventually tossed it back to him, unheeded. He sat down on a rock and tried to think.
Firstly, he was lost. That was vexing, but it did not worry him unduly. The forest looked quite interesting and probably held elves or gnomes, perhaps both. In fact on a couple of occasions he had thought he had seen strange green faces peering down at him from the branches. Twoflower had always wanted to meet an elf. In fact what he really wanted to meet was a dragon, but an elf would do. Or a real goblin.
His Luggage was missing, and that was annoying. It was also starting to rain. He squirmed uncomfortably on the damp stone, and tried to look on the bright side. For example, during its mad dash his plunging horse had burst through some bushes and disturbed a she-bear with her cubs, but had gone on before the bear could react. Then it had suddenly been galloping over the sleeping bodies of a large wolf pack and, again, its mad speed had been such that the furious yelping had been left far behind. Nevertheless, the day was wearing on and perhaps it would be a good idea—Twoflower thought—not to hang about in the open. Perhaps there was a … he racked his brains trying to remember what sort of accommodation forests traditionally offered … perhaps there was a gingerbread house or something?
The stone really was uncomfortable. Twoflower looked down and, for the first time, noticed the strange carving.
It looked like a spider. Or was it a squid? Moss and lichens rather blurred the precise details. But they didn’t blur the runes carved below it. Twoflower could read them clearly, and they said:
Traveller, the hospitable temple of Bel-Shamharoth lies one thousand paces Hubwards.
Now this was strange, Twoflower realised, because although he could read the message the actual letters were completely unknown to him. Somehow the message was arriving in his brain without the tedious necessity of passing through his eyes.
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