The mud around the egg began to bubble.
And exploded.
The ground peeled back like lemon rind. Gouts of steaming mud spattered the wizards as they dived for the cover of the trees. Only Coin, Spelter and Carding were left to watch the sparkling white building arise from the meadow, grass and dirt pouring off it. Other towers erupted from the ground behind them; buttresses
‘It’s too big,’ said Spelter under his breath. The world he had lived in hadn’t stretched much further than the gates of the University, and he’d preferred it that way. A man could be comfortable in a world that size. He certainly couldn’t be comfortable about being half a mile in the air standing on something that wasn’t, in some fundamental way, there.
The thought shocked him. He was a wizard, and he was worrying about magic.
He sidled cautiously back towards Carding, who said: ‘It isn’t exactly what I expected.’
‘Um?’
‘It looks a lot smaller up here, doesn’t it.’
‘Well, I don’t know. Listen, I must tell you—’
‘Look at the Ramtops, now. You could almost reach out and touch them.’
They stared out across two hundred leagues towards the towering mountain range, glittering and white and cold. It was said that if you travelled hubwards through the secret valleys of the Ramtops, you would find, in the frozen lands under Cori Celesti itself, the secret realm of the Ice Giants, imprisoned after their last great battle with the gods. In those days the mountains had been mere islands in a great sea of ice, and ice lived on them still.
Coin smiled his golden smile.
‘What did you say, Carding?’ he said.
‘It’s the clear air, lord. And they look so close and small. I only said I could almost touch them—’
Coin waved him into silence. He extended one thin arm, rolling back his sleeve in the traditional sign that magic was about to be performed without trickery. He reached out, and then turned back with his fingers closed around what was, without any shadow of a doubt, a handful of snow.
The two wizards observed it in stunned silence as it melted and dripped on to the floor.
Coin laughed.
‘You find it so hard to believe?’ he said. ‘Shall I pick pearls from rim-most Krull, or sand from the Great Nef? Could your old wizardry do half as much?’
It seemed to Spelter that his voice took on a metallic edge. He stared intently at their faces.
Finally Carding sighed and said rather quietly, ‘No. All my life I have sought magic, and all I found was coloured lights and little tricks and old, dry books. Wizardry has done nothing for the world.’
‘And if I tell you that I intend to dissolve the Orders and close the University? Although, of course, my senior
‘You’re very quiet, Spelter. Do you not agree?’
No. The world had sourcery once, and gave it up for wizardry. Wizardry is magic for men, not gods. It’s not for us. There was something wrong with it, and we have forgotten what it was. I liked wizardry. It didn’t upset the world. It fitted. It was right. A wizard was all I wanted to be.
He looked down at his feet.
‘Yes,’ he whispered.
‘Good,’ said Coin, in a satisfied tone of voice. He strolled to the edge of the tower and looked down at the street map of Ankh-Morpork far below. The Tower of Art came barely a tenth of the way towards them.
‘I believe,’ he said, ‘I believe that we will hold the ceremony next week, at full moon.’
‘Er. It won’t be full moon for three weeks,’ said Carding.
‘Next week,’ Coin repeated. ‘If I say the moon will be full, there will be no argument.’ He continued to stare down at the model buildings of the University, and then pointed.
‘What’s that?’
Carding craned.
‘Er. The Library. Yes. It’s the Library. Er.’
The silence was so oppressive that Carding felt something more was expected of him. Anything would be better than that silence.
‘It’s where we keep the books, you know. Ninety thousand volumes, isn’t it, Spelter?’
‘Um? Oh. Yes. About ninety thousand, I suppose.’
Coin leaned on the staff and stared.
‘Burn them,’ he said. ‘All of them.’
After a while he heard a sound like heavy furniture being moved about.
‘Oook?’
‘It’s me.’
‘Oook?’
‘Spelter.’
‘Oook.’
‘Look, you’ve got to get out! He’s going to burn the Library!’
There was no reply.
Spelter let himself sag to his knees.
‘He’ll do it, too,’ he whispered. ‘He’ll probably make
‘Oook?’
‘The other night, I looked into his room … the staff, the staff was
Spelter stopped. His face froze. He turned around very slowly, without willing it, because something was gently spinning him.
He knew the University was empty. The wizards had all moved into the New Tower, where the lowliest student had a suite more splendid than any senior mage had before.
The staff hung in the air a few feet away. It was surrounded by a faint octarine glow.
He stood up very carefully and, keeping his back to the stonework and his eyes firmly fixed on the thing, slithered gingerly along the wall until he reached the end of the corridor. At the corner he noted that the staff, while not moving had revolved on its axis to follow him.
He gave a little cry, grasped the skirts of his robe, and ran.
The staff was in front of him. He slid to a halt and stood there, catching his breath.
‘You don’t frighten me,’ he lied, and turned on his heel and marched off in a different direction, snapping his fingers to produce a torch that burned with a fine white flame (only its penumbra of octarine proclaimed it to be of magical origin).
Once again, the staff was in front of him. The light of his torch was sucked into a thin, singeing stream of white fire that flared and vanished with a ‘pop’.
He waited, his eyes watering with blue after-images, but if the staff was still there it didn’t seem to be inclined to take advantage of him. When vision returned he felt he could make out an even darker shadow on his left. The stairway down to the kitchens.
He darted for it, leaping down the unseen steps and landing heavily and unexpectedly on uneven flags. A little moonlight filtered through a grating in the distance and somewhere up there, he knew, was a doorway into the outside world.
Staggering a little, his ankles aching, the noise of his own breath booming in his ears as though he’d stuck his entire head in a seashell, Spelter set off across the endless dark desert of the floor.
Things clanked underfoot. There were no rats here now, of course, but the kitchen had fallen into disuse lately – the University’s cooks had been the best in the world, but now any wizard could conjure up meals beyond mere culinary skill. The big copper pans hung neglected on the wall, their sheen already tarnishing, and the kitchen ranges under the giant chimney arch were filled with nothing but chilly ash…
The staff lay across the back door like a bar. It spun up as Spelter tottered towards it and hung, radiating quiet malevolence, a few feet away. Then, quite smoothly, it began to glide towards him.
He backed away, his feet slipping on the greasy stones. A thump across the back of his thighs made him yelp, but as he reached behind him he found it was only one of the chopping blocks.
His hand groped desperately across its scarred surface and, against all hope, found a cleaver buried in the wood. In an instinctive gesture as ancient as mankind, Spelter’s fingers closed around its handle.
He was out of breath and out of patience and out of space and time and also scared, very nearly, out of his mind.
So when the staff hovered in front of him he wrenched the chopper up and around with all the strength he could muster …
And hesitated. All that was wizardly in him cried out against the destruction of so much power, power that perhaps even now could be used, used by him…
And the staff swung around so that its axis was pointing directly at him.
And several corridors away, the Librarian stood braced with his back against the Library door, watching the blue and white flashes that flickered across the floor. He heard the distant snap of raw energy, and a sound that started low and ended up in zones of pitch that even Wuffles, lying with his paws over his head, could not hear.
And then there was a faint, ordinary tinkling noise, such as might be made by a fused and twisted metal cleaver dropping on to flagstones.
It was the sort of noise that makes the silence that comes after it roll forwards like a warm avalanche.
The Librarian wrapped the silence around him like a cloak and stood staring up at the rank on rank of books, each one pulsing faintly in the flow of its own magic. Shelf after shelf looked down at him. They had heard. He could feel the fear.
The orang-utan stood statue-still for several minutes, and then appeared to reach a decision. He knuckled his way across to his desk and, after much rummaging, produced a heavy key-ring bristling with keys. Then he went back and stood in the middle of the floor and said, very deliberately, ‘Oook.’
The books craned forward on their shelves. Now he had their full attention.
Rincewind looked around him, and made a guess.
They were still in the heart of Al Khali. He could hear the hum of it beyond the walls. But in the middle of the teeming city someone had cleared a vast space, walled it off, and planted a garden so romantically natural that it looked as real as a sugar pig.
‘It looks like someone has taken twice five miles of inner city and girdled them round with walls and towers,’ he hazarded.
‘What a strange idea,’ said Conina.
‘Well, some of the religions here – well, when you die, you see, they think you go to this sort of garden, where there’s all this sort of music and, and,’ he continued, wretchedly, ‘sherbet and, and – young women.’
Conina took in the green splendour of the walled garden, with its peacocks, intricate arches and slightly wheezy fountains. A dozen reclining women stared back at her, impassively. A hidden string orchestra was playing the complicated Klatchian
A sword point prodded her in the small of the back, and the two of them set out along the ornate path towards a small domed pavilion surrounded by olive trees. She scowled.
‘Anyway, I don’t like sherbet.’
Rincewind didn’t comment. He was busily examining the state of his own mind, and wasn’t happy at the sight of it. He had a horrible feeling that he was falling in love.
He was sure he had all the symptoms. There were the sweaty palms, the hot sensation in the stomach, the general feeling that the skin of his chest was made of tight elastic. There was the feeling every time Conina spoke, that someone was running hot steel into his spine.
He glanced down at the Luggage, tramping stoically alongside him, and recognised the symptoms.
‘Not you, too?’ he said.
Possibly it was only the play of sunlight on the Luggage’s battered lid, but it was just possible that for an instant it looked redder than usual.
Of course, sapient pearwood has this sort of weird mental link with its owner … Rincewind shook his head. Still, it’d explain why the thing wasn’t its normal malignant self.
‘It’d never work,’ he said. ‘I mean, she’s a female and you’re a, well, you’re a—’ He paused. ‘Well, whatever you are, you’re of the wooden persuasion. It’d never work. People would talk.’
He turned and glared at the black-robed guards behind him.
‘I don’t know what you’re looking at,’ he said severely.
The Luggage sidled over to Conina, following her so closely that she banged an ankle on it.
‘Push off,’ she snapped, and kicked it again, this time on purpose.
Insofar as the Luggage ever had an expression, it looked at her in shocked betrayal.
The pavilion ahead of them was an ornate onion-shaped dome, studded with precious stones and supported on four pillars. Its interior was a mass of cushions on which lay a rather fat, middle-aged man surrounded by three young women. He wore a purple robe interwoven with gold thread; they, as far as Rincewind could see, demonstrated that you could make six small saucepan lids and a few yards of curtain netting go a long way although – he shivered – not really fat enough.
The man appeared to be writing. He glanced up at them.
‘I suppose you don’t know a good rhyme for “thou”?’ he said peevishly.
Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.
‘Plough?’ said Rincewind. ‘Bough?’
‘Cow?’ suggested Conina, with forced brightness.
The man hesitated. ‘Cow I quite like,’ he said. ‘Cow has got possibilities. Cow might, in fact, do. Do pull up a cushion, by the way. Have some sherbet. Why are you standing there like that?’
‘It’s these ropes,’ said Conina.
‘I have this allergy to cold steel,’ Rincewind added.
‘Really, how tiresome,’ said the fat man, and clapped a pair of hands so heavy with rings that the sound was more of a clang. Two guards stepped forward smartly and cut the bonds, and then the whole battalion melted away, although Rincewind was acutely conscious of dozens of dark eyes watching them from the surrounding foliage. Animal instinct told him that, while he now appeared to be alone with the man and Conina, any aggressive moves on his part would suddenly make the world a sharp and painful place. He tried to radiate tranquillity and total friendliness. He tried to think of something to say.
‘Well,’ he ventured, looking around at the brocaded hangings, the ruby-studded pillars and the gold filigree cushions, ‘you’ve done this place up nicely. It’s—’ he sought for something suitably descriptive – ‘well, pretty much of a miracle of rare device.’
‘One aims for simplicity,’ sighed the man, still scribbling busily. ‘Why are you here? Not that it isn’t always a pleasure to meet fellow students of the poetic muse.’
‘We were brought here,’ said Conina.
‘Men with swords,’ added Rincewind.
‘Dear fellows, they do so like to keep in practice. Would you like one of these?’
He snapped his fingers at one of the girls.
‘Not, er, right now,’ Rincewind began, but she’d picked up a plate of golden-brown sticks and demurely passed it towards him. He tried one. It was delicious, a sort of sweet crunchy flavour with a hint of honey. He took two more.
‘Excuse me,’ said Conina, ‘but who are you? And where is this?’
‘My name is Creosote, Seriph of Al Khali,’ said the fat man, ‘and this is my Wilderness. One does one’s best.’
Rincewind coughed on his honey stick.
‘Not Creosote as in “As rich as Creosote”?’ he said.
‘That was my dear father. I am, in fact, rather richer. When one has a great deal of money, I am afraid, it is hard to achieve simplicity. One does one’s best.’ He sighed.
‘You could try giving it away,’ said Conina.
He sighed again. ‘That isn’t easy, you know. No, one just has to try to do a little with a lot.’
‘No, no, but look,’ said Rincewind, spluttering bits of stick, ‘they say, I mean, everything you touch turns into gold , for goodness sake.’
‘That could make going to the lavatory a bit tricky,’ said Conina brightly. ‘Sorry.’
‘One hears such stories about oneself,’ said Creosote, affecting not to have heard. ‘So tiresome. As if wealth mattered. True riches lie in the treasure houses of literature.’
‘The Creosote Iheard of,’ said Conina slowly, ‘was head of this band of, well, mad killers. The original Assassins, feared throughout hubward Klatch. No offence meant.’
‘Ah yes, dear father,’ said Creosote junior. ‘The Hashishim . Such a novel idea. But not really very efficient. So we hired Thugs instead.’