The Light Fantastic

by Terry Pratchett

Page 6

  . . . 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 imp
ossible 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.