The Light Fantastic

by Terry Pratchett

Page 15

  It's not the same,' said Twoflower calmly.

  'It's better! It's more real!'

  'It isn't really. In years to come, when I'm sitting by the fire —'

  'You'll be sitting by the fire forever if we don't get out of here!'

  'Oh, I do hope you're not going. '

  They both turned. Ysabell was standing in the archway, smiling faintly. She held a scythe in one hand, a scythe with a blade of proverbial sharpness. Rincewind tried not to look down at his blue lifeline; a girl holding a scythe shouldn't smile in that unpleasant, knowing and slightly deranged way.

  'Daddy seems a little preoccupied at the moment but I'm sure he wouldn't dream of letting you go off just like that,' she added. 'Besides, I'd have no-one to talk to. '

  'Who's this?' said Twoflower.

  'She sort of lives here,' mumbled Rincewind. 'She's a sort of girl,' he added.

  He grabbed Twoflower's shoulder and tried to shuffle imperceptibly towards the door into the dark, cold garden. It didn't work, largely because Twoflower wasn't the sort of person who went in for nuances of expression and somehow never assumed that anything bad might apply to him.

  'Charmed, I'm sure,' he said. Very nice place, you have here. Interesting baroque effect with the bones and skulls. '

  Ysabell smiled. Rincewind thought: if Death ever does hand over the family business, she'll be better at it than he is – she's bonkers.

  'Yes, but we must be going,' he said.

  'I really won't hear of it,' she said. You must stay and tell me all about yourselves. There's plenty of time and it's so boring here. '

  She darted sideways and swung the scythe at the shining threads. It screamed through the air like a neutered tomcat – and stopped sharply.

  There was the creak of wood. The Luggage had snapped its lid shut on the blade.

  Twoflower looked up at Rincewind in astonishment.

  And the wizard, with great deliberation and a certain amount of satisfaction, hit him smartly on the chin. As the little man fell backwards Rincewind caught him, threw him over a shoulder and ran.

  Branches whipped at him in the starlit garden, and small, furry and probably horrible things scampered away as he pounded desperately along the faint lifeline that shone eerily on the freezing grass.

  From the building behind him came a shrill scream of disappointment and rage. He cannoned off a tree and sped on.

  Somewhere there was a path, he remembered. But in this maze of silver light and shadows, tinted now with red as the terrible new star made its presence felt even in the netherworld, nothing looked right. Anyway, the lifeline appeared to be going in quite the wrong direction.

  There was the sound of feet behind him. Rincewind wheezed with effort; it sounded like the Luggage, and at the moment he didn't want to meet the Luggage, because it might have got the wrong idea about him hitting its master, and generally the Luggage bit people it didn't like. Rincewind had never had the nerve to ask where it was they actually went when the heavy lid slammed shut on them, but they certainly weren't there when it opened again.

  In fact he needn't have worried. The Luggage overtook him easily, its little legs a blur of movement. It seemed to Rincewind to be concentrating very heavily on running, as if it had some inkling of what was coming up behind it and didn't like the idea at all.

  Don't look back, he remembered. The view probably isn't very nice.

  The Luggage crashed through a bush and vanished.

  A moment later Rincewind saw why. It had careened over the edge of the outcrop and was dropping towards the great hole underneath, which he could now see was faintly red lit at the bottom. Stretching from Rincewind, out over the edge of the rocks and down into the hole, were two shimmering blue lines.

  He paused uncertainly, although that isn't precisely true because he was totally certain of several things, for example that he didn't want to jump, and that he certainly didn't want to face whatever it was coming up behind him, and that in the spirit world Twoflower was quite heavy, and that there were worse things than being dead.

  'Name two,' he muttered, and jumped.

  A few seconds later the horsemen arrived and didn't stop when they reached the edge of the rock but simply rode into the air and reined their horses over nothingness.

  Death looked down.

  THAT ALWAYS ANNOYS ME, he said. I MIGHT AS WELL INSTALL A REVOLVING DOOR.

  'I wonder what they wanted!' said Pestilence.

  'Search me,' said War. 'Nice game, though. '

  'Right,' agreed Famine. 'Compelling, I thought. '

  WE'VE GOT TIME FOR ANOTHER FONDLE, said Death.

  'Rubber,' corrected War.

  RUBBER WHAT?

  'You call them rubbers,' said War.

  RIGHT, RUBBERS, said Death. He looked up at the new star, puzzled as to what it might mean.

  I THINK WE'VE GOT TIME, he repeated, a trifle uncertainly.

  Mention has already been made of an attempt to inject a little honesty into reporting on the Disc, and how poets and bards were banned on pain of – well, pain – from going on about babbling brooks and rosy-fingered dawn and could only say, for example, that a face had launched a thousand ships if they were able to produce certified dockyard accounts.

  And therefore, out of a passing respect for this tradition, it will not be said of Rincewind and Twoflower that they became an ice-blue sinewave arcing through the dark imensions, or that there was a sound like the twanging of a monstrous tusk, or that their lives passed in front of their eyes (Rincewind had in any case seen his past life flash in front of his eyes so many times that he could sleep through the boring bits) or that the universe dropped on them like a large jelly.

  It will be said, because experiment has proven it to be true, that there was a noise like a wooden ruler being struck heavily with a C sharp tuning fork, possibly B flat, and a sudden sensation of absolute stillness.

  This was because they were absolutely still, and it was absolutely dark.

  It occurred to Rincewind that something had gone wrong.

  Then he saw the faint blue tracery in front of him.

  He was inside the Octavo again. He wondered what would happen if anyone opened the book; would he and Twoflower appear like a colour plate?

  Probably not, he decided. The Octavo they were in was something a bit different from the mere book chained to its lectern deep in Unseen University, which was merely a three-dimensional representation of a multidimensional reality, and—

  Hold on, he thought. I don't think like this. Who's thinking for me?

  'Rincewind,' said a voice like the rustle of old pages.

  'Who? Me?'

  'Of course you, you daft sod. '

  A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind's battered heart.

  'Have you managed to recall how the Universe started yet?' he said nastily. 'The Clearing of the Throat, wasn't it, or the Drawing of the Breath, or the Scratching of the Head and Trying to Remember It, It was On the Tip of the Tongue?'

  Another voice, dry as tinder, hissed, 'You would do well to remember where you are. ' It should be impossible to hiss a sentence with no sibilants in it, but the voice made a very good attempt.

  'Remember where I am? Remember where I am?' shouted Rincewind. 'Of course I remember where I am, I'm inside a bloody book talking to a load of voices I can't see, why do you think I'm screaming?'

  'I expect you're wondering why we brought you here again,' said a voice by his ear.

  'No. '

  'No?'

  'What did he say?' said another disembodied voice.

  'He said no. '

  'He really said no?'

  'Yes. '

  'Oh. '

  'Why?'

  'This sort of thing happens to me all the time,' said Rincewind. 'One minute I'm falling off the world, then I'm inside a book, then I'm on a flying rock, then I'm watchi
ng Death learn how to play Weir or Dam or whatever it was, why should I wonder about anything?'

  'Well, we imagine you will be wondering why we don't want anyone to say us,' said the first voice, aware that it was losing the initiative.

  Rincewind hesitated. The thought had crossed his mind, only very fast and looking nervously from side to side in case it got knocked over.

  'Why should anyone want to say you?'

  'It's the star,' said the spell. 'The red star. Wizards are already looking for you; when they find you they want to say all eight Spells together to change the future. They think the Disc is going to collide with the star. '

  Rincewind thought about this. 'Is it?'

  'Not exactly, but in a— what's that?'

  Rincewind looked down. The Luggage padded out of the darkness. There was a long sliver of scytheblade in its lid.

  'It's just the Luggage,' he said.

  'But we didn't summon it here!'

  'No-one summons it anywhere,' said Rincewind. 'It just turns up. Don't worry about it. '

  'Oh. What were we talking about?'

  'This red star thing. '

  'Right. It's very important that you —'

  'Hallo? Hallo? Anyone out there?'

  It was a small and squeaky voice and came from the picture box still slung around Twoflower's inert neck.

  The picture imp opened his hatch and squinted up at Rincewind.

  'Where's this, squire?' it said.

  'I'm not sure. '

  'We still dead?'

  'Maybe. '

  'Well, let's hope we go somewhere where we don't need too much black, because I've run out. ' The hatch slammed shut.

  Rincewind had a fleeting vision of Twoflower handing around his pictures and saying things like 'This is me being tormented by a million demons' and 'This is me with that funny couple we met on the freezing slopes of the Underworld. ' Rincewind wasn't certain about what happened to you after you really died, the authorities were a little unclear on the subject; a swarthy sailor from the Rimward lands had said that he was confident of going to a paradise where there was sherbet and houris. Rincewind wasn't certain what a houri was, but after some thought he came to the conclusion that it was a little liquorice tube for sucking up the sherbet. Anyway, sherbet made him sneeze.

  'Now that interruption is over,' said a dry voice firmly, 'perhaps we can get on. It is most important that you don't let the wizards take the spell from you. Terrible things will happen if all eight spells are said too soon. '

  'I just want to be left in peace,' said Rincewind.

  'Good, good. We knew we could trust you from the day you first opened the Octavo. '

  Rincewind hesitated. 'Hang on a minute,' he said. 'You want me to run around keeping the wizards from getting all the spells together?'

  'Exactly. '

  'That's why one of you got into my head?'

  'Precisely. '

  'You totally ruined my life, you know that?' said Rincewind hotly. 'I could have really made it as a wizard if you hadn't decided to use me as a sort of portable spellbook. I can't remember any other spells, they're too frightened to stay in the same head as you!'

  'We're sorry. '

  'I just want to go home! I want to go back to where—' a trace of moisture appeared in Rincewind's eye – 'to where there's cobbles under your feet and some of the beer isn't too bad and you can get quite a good piece of fried fish of an evening, with maybe a couple of big green gherkins, and even an eel pie and a dish of whelks, and there's always a warm stable somewhere to sleep in and in the morning you are always in the same place as you were the night before and there wasn't all this weather all over the place. I mean, I don't mind about the magic, I'm probably not, you know, the right sort of material for a wizard, I just want to go home!—'

  'But you must—' one of the spells began.

  It was too late. Homesickness, the little elastic band in the subconscious that can wind up a salmon and propel it three thousand miles through strange seas, or send a million lemmings running joyfully back to an ancestral homeland which, owing to a slight kink in the continental drift, isn't there any more – homesickness rose up inside Rincewind like a late-night prawn biriani, flowed along the tenuous thread linking his tortured soul to his body, dug its heels in and tugged . . .