Last Continent

by Pratchett, Terry

  Except for the absence of screams, the hand tracing its infinitely simple lines on the rock brought back memories of Houser. There was a sense of something small being done that was making something happen that was huge.

  He sat and watched. It was, he remembered later whenever he was in a state to remember anything, one of the happiest times of his life.

  * * *

  When Rincewind lifted his head a watchman’s helmet was spinning gently on the ground.

  To his amazement the men themselves were still there, although they were lying around in various attitudes of unconsciousness or at least, if they had sense, feigned unconsciousness. The Luggage had a cat’s tendency to lose interest in things that didn’t fight back even after you’d kicked them a few times.

  Shoes littered the ground, too. The Luggage was limping around in a circle.

  Rincewind sighed, and stood up. ‘Take the shoes off. They don’t suit you,’ he said.

  The Luggage stood still for a moment, and then the rest of the shoes clattered against the wall.

  ‘And the dress. What would those nice ladies think if they saw you dressing up like this?’

  The Luggage shrugged off the few sequinned tatters that remained.

  ‘Turn around, I want to see your handles. No, I said turn around. Turn around properly, please. Ah, I thought so . . . I said turn around. Those earrings . . . they don’t do anything for you at all, you know.’ He leaned closer. ‘Is that a stud? Have you had your lid pierced?’

  The Luggage backed away. Its manner indicated very clearly that while it might give in on the shoes, the dress and even the earrings, the battle over the stud would go to the finish.

  ‘Well . . . all right. Now give me my clean underwear, you could make shelves out of the stuff I’m wearing.’

  The Luggage opened its lid.

  ‘Good, now I— Is that my underwear? Would I be seen dead in something like that? Yes, as a matter of fact I suspect I would. My underwear, please. It’s got my name inside, although I must admit I can’t quite remember why I thought that was necessary.’

  The lid shut. The lid opened.

  ‘Thank you.’

  It was no use wondering how it was done, or for that matter why the laundry returned freshly ironed.

  The watchmen were still very wisely remaining unconscious, but out of habit Rincewind went behind a stack of old boxes to change. He was the sort of person who’d go behind a tree to change if he was on a desert island all alone.

  ‘You noticed something odd about this alley?’ he said, over the top of the boxes. ‘There’re no drainpipes. There’re no gutters. They’ve never heard of rain here. I suppose you are the Luggage, aren’t you, and not some kangaroo in disguise? Why am I asking? Ye gods, these feel good. Right, let’s go—’

  The Luggage opened its lid again, and a young woman looked up at Rincewind.

  ‘Who are—? Oh, you’re the blind man,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Sorry . . . Darleen said you must be blind. Well, actually she said you must be bloody blind. Can you give me a hand out?’

  It dawned on Rincewind that the girl clambering out of the Luggage was Neilette, the third member of Letitia’s crew and the one who’d seemed quite plain compared to the others and certainly a lot less . . . well, noisy wasn’t quite the word. Probably the word was ‘expansive’. They filled the space around them to capacity. Take Darleen, a lady he’d last seen holding a man daintily by the collar so that she could punch him in the face. When she walked into a room, there’d be no one in it unaware that she had done so.

  Neilette was just . . . ordinary. She brushed some dirt off her dress, and sighed.

  ‘I could see there was going to be another fight so I hid in Trunkie,’ she said.

  ‘Trunkie, eh?’ said Rincewind. The Luggage had the decency to look embarrassed.

  ‘Sooner or later there’s always a fight where Darleen goes,’ said Neilette. ‘You’d be amazed the things she can do with a stiletto heel.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen one of them,’ said Rincewind. ‘Don’t tell me the others. Um, can I help you? Only me and Trunkie here’ – he gave the Luggage a kick – ‘were heading off, weren’t we, Trunkie?’

  ‘Oh, don’t kick her, she’s been so useful,’ said Neilette.

  ‘Really?’ said Rincewind. The Luggage turned around slowly so that he couldn’t see the expression on its lock.

  ‘Oh, yes. I reckon the miners in Cangoolie would’ve . . . been very unpleasant to Letitia if Trunkie hadn’t stepped in.’

  ‘Stepped on, I expect.’

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘Oh, the L— Trunkie is mine. We got separated.’

  Neilette tried to arrange her hair. ‘It’s all right for the others,’ she said. ‘They just have to change wigs. Beer might be a good shampoo, but not when it’s still in the tinnie.’ She sighed. ‘Oh, well. I suppose I’ll have to find a way home, now.’

  ‘Where do you live?’

  ‘Worralorrasurfa. It’s Rimwards.’ She sighed again. ‘Back to life in the banana-bending factory. So much for showbusiness!’

  Then she burst into tears and sat down heavily on the Luggage.

  Rincewind didn’t know whether he should go into the ‘pat, pat, there, there’ routine. If she was like Darleen, he might lose an arm. He made what he hoped was a soothing yet non-aggressive mumble.

  ‘I mean, I know I can’t sing very well and I can’t dance but, frankly, neither can Letitia and Darleen. When Darleen sings “Prancing Queen” you could slice bread with it. Not that they’ve been unkind,’ she added quickly, polite even in the throes of woe, ‘but really there’s got to be more to life than getting beer thrown at you every night and being chased out of town.’

  Rincewind felt confident enough to venture a ‘there, there’. He didn’t risk a ‘pat, pat’.

  ‘Really I only did it because of Noelene dropping out,’ Neilette sobbed. ‘And I’m about the same height and Letitia couldn’t find anyone else in time and I needed the money and she said it would be okay provided people didn’t notice my hands were so small . . .’

  ‘Noelene being—?’

  ‘My brother. I told him, trying for the surf championship is fine, and ballgowns are fine, but both together? I don’t think so. Did you know what a nasty rash you can get from being rolled across coral? And next morning Letitia had this tour organized and, well, it seemed a good idea at the time.’

  ‘Noelene . . .’ Rincewind mused. ‘That’s an unusual name for a . . .’

  ‘Darleen said you wouldn’t understand.’ Neilette stared into the middle distance. ‘I think my brother worked in the factory too long,’ she mused. ‘He always was very impressionable. Anyway, I—’

  ‘Oh, I get it, he’s a female impersonator,’ said Rincewind. ‘Oh, I know about those. Old pantomime tradition. A couple of balloons, a straw wig and a few grubby jokes. Why, when I was a student, at Hogswatch parties old Farter Carter and Really Pants would put on a turn where—’

  He was aware that she was giving him one of those long, slow looks.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘Do you get about much?’

  ‘You’d be amazed,’ said Rincewind.

  ‘And you meet all kinds of people?’

  ‘Generally the nastier kind, I have to admit.’

  ‘Well, some men . . .’ Neilette stopped. ‘Really Pants? That was someone’s name?’

  ‘Not exactly. He was called Ronald Pants, so of course when anyone heard that they said—’

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ said Neilette. She stood up and blew her nose. ‘I told the others I’d leave when we got to the Galah, so they’ll understand. Being a . . . female impersonator is no job for a woman, which is what I am, incidentally. I’d hoped it was obvious, but in your case I thought I’d better mention it. Can you get us out of here, Trunkie?’

  The Luggage wandered over to the wall at the end of the alley and kicked it until there was
a decent-sized hole. On the way back it clogged a watchman who was unwise enough to stir.

  ‘Er, I call him the Luggage,’ said Rincewind helplessly.

  ‘Really? We call her Trunkie.’

  The wall opened up into a dark room. Crates were packed against the walls, covered with cobwebs.

  ‘Oh, we’re in the old brewery,’ said Neilette. ‘Well, the new one, really. Let’s find a door.’

  ‘Good idea,’ said Rincewind, eyeing the spider-webs. ‘New brewery? Looks pretty old to me . . .’

  Neilette rattled a door. ‘Locked,’ she said. ‘Come on, we’ll find another one. Look, it’s the new brewery because we built it to replace the one over the river. But it never worked. The beer went flat, or something. They all said it was haunted. Everyone knows that, don’t they? We went back to the old brewery. My dad lost nearly all his money.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He owned it. Just about broke his heart, that did. He left it to me,’ she tried another door, ‘because, well, he never got on with Noelene, what with the, well, you know, or rather, obviously you don’t . . . but it ruined the business, really. And Roo Beer used to be the best there was.’

  ‘Can’t you sell it? The site, I mean.’

  ‘Here? A place where beer goes flat within five seconds? Can’t give it away.’

  Rincewind peered up at the big metal vats. ‘Perhaps it was built on some old religious site,’ he said. ‘That sort of thing can happen, you know. Back home there was this fish restaurant that got built on a—’

  Neilette rattled another unbudging door. ‘That’s what everyone thought,’ she said. ‘But apparently Dad asked all the local tribes and they said it wasn’t. They said it wasn’t any kind of sacred site. They said it was an unsacred site. Some chief went to prison to see the prime minister and said, “Mate, your mob can dig it all up and drop it over the edge of the world, no worries.”’

  ‘Why did he have to go to prison?’

  ‘We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It saves time.’ She tried an unrelenting handle. ‘Damn! And the windows are too high . . .’

  The ground trembled. Metal jangled, somewhere in the darkness. Dust moved in strange little waves across the floor.

  ‘Oh, not again,’ said Neilette.

  Now not only the dust moved. Tiny shapes scuttled across it, flowed around Rincewind’s feet and sped under the locked door.

  ‘The spiders are leaving!’ said Neilette.

  ‘Fine by me!’ said Rincewind.

  This time the tremor made the wall creak.

  ‘It’s never been this bad,’ Neilette muttered. ‘Find a ladder, we’ll give the windows a go.’

  Above them a ladder parted company from the wall and folded itself into a metal puzzle on the floor.

  ‘This may not seem a good time to ask,’ said Rincewind, ‘but are you a kangaroo, by any chance?’

  Far above them metal creaked and went on creaking, in a long-drawn wail of inorganic pain. Rincewind looked up, and saw the dome of the brewery gently dissolve into a hundred falling pieces of glass.

  And, dropping through the middle of it, some of its lamps still burning, the grinning shape of the Roo Beer kangaroo.

  ‘Trunkie! Open up!’ Neilette yelled.

  ‘No—’ Rincewind began, but she grabbed him and dragged him and in front of him was an opening lid . . .

  The world went dark.

  There was wood underneath him. He tapped it, very carefully. And wood in front of him. And w—

  ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘We’re inside the Luggage?’

  ‘Why not? That’s how we got out of Cangoolie last week! Y’know, I think it may be a magic box.’

  ‘Do you know some of the things that have been inside it?’

  ‘Letitia kept her gin in it, I know that.’

  Rincewind felt upwards, gingerly.

  Maybe the Luggage had more than one inside. He’d suspected as much. Maybe it was like one of those conjuror’s boxes where, after you’d put a penny in, the drawer miraculously slid around and it had gone. Rincewind had been given one of those as a toy when he was a kid. He’d lost almost two dollars before he gave up and threw the thing away . . .

  His fingers touched what might have been a lid, and he pushed upwards.

  They were still in the brewery. This came as some relief, considering where you might end up if you got into the Luggage. There was still the bowel-disturbing rumble, punctuated by clangs and tinkles as bits of rusted metal crashed down with lethal intent.

  The big kangaroo sign was well alight.

  In the smoke that rose from it were some pointy hats.

  That is, the curls swirling and billowing around holes in the air looked very much like the three-dimensional silhouettes of a group of wizards.

  Rincewind stepped out of the Luggage. ‘Oh, no, no, no,’ he mumbled. ‘I only got here a couple of months ago. It’s not my fault!’

  ‘They look like ghosts,’ said Neilette. ‘Do you know them?’

  ‘No! But they’re all mixed up with these earthquakes! And something called The Wet, whatever that was!’

  ‘That’s just some old story, isn’t it? Anyway, Mister Wizard, it might have escaped your notice that the place is filling up with smoke! Which way did we come in?’

  Rincewind looked around desperately. Smoke obscured everything.

  ‘Has this place got cellars?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah! I used to play Mothers and Mothers with Noelene in them when we were kids. Look for hatches in the floor!’

  And it was three minutes later that the ancient wooden hatchcover in the alley finally gave way under the Luggage’s insistent pounding. Several rats poured out, followed by Rincewind and Neilette.

  No one paid them any attention. A column of smoke was rising over the city. Watchmen and citizens were already forming a bucket chain and men with a battering ram were trying to break open the brewery’s main doors.

  ‘We’re well out of that,’ Rincewind observed. ‘Oh, boy, yes.’

  ‘Hey, what’s going on? Where’s the bloody water gone?’

  The cry came from a man working the handle of a pump out on the street, just as the pump gave a groan and the handle went limp. A watchman grabbed his arm.

  ‘There’s another one in the yard over there! Get a wiggle on, mate!’

  A couple of men tried the other pump. It made a choking noise, spat out a few drops of water and some damp rust, and gave up.

  Rincewind swallowed. ‘I think the water’s gone,’ he said, flatly.

  ‘What do you mean, gone?’ said Neilette. ‘There’s always water. Huge great seas of it underground!’

  ‘Yes, but . . . it doesn’t get filled up much, does it? It doesn’t rain here.’

  ‘There you go aga—’ She stopped. ‘What’s it you know? You’re looking shifty, Mister Wizard.’

  Rincewind stared glumly up at the tower of smoke. There were twirling, tumbling sparks in it, rising in the heat and showering down over the city. Everything will be bone dry, he thought. It doesn’t rain here. It— Hang on . . .

  ‘How do you know I’m a wizard?’ he said.

  ‘It’s written on your hat,’ she said. ‘Badly.’

  ‘You know what a wizard is? This is a serious question. I’m not pushing a prawn.’

  ‘Everyone knows what a wizard is! We’ve got a university full of the useless mongrels!’

  ‘And you can show me where this is, can you?’

  ‘Find it yourself!’ She tried to stride off through the milling crowd. He ran after her.

  ‘Please don’t go! I need someone like you! As an interpreter!’

  ‘What do you mean? We speak the same language!’

  ‘Really? Stubbies here are really short shorts or small beer bottles. How often do newcomers confuse the two?’

  Neilette actually smiled. ‘Not more than once.’


  ‘Just take me to this university of yours, will you?’ said Rincewind. ‘I think I can feel a Famous Last Stand coming on.’

  There was a brief scream of metal overhead and a windmill fan crashed down into the street.

  ‘And we’d better be quick,’ he added. ‘Otherwise all there’ll be to drink is beer.’

  The Bursar laughed again as a series of little charcoal dots extended their legs, formed up and marched down the stone and across the sand in front of him. Behind him the trees were already loud with birdsong—

  And then, sadly, with wizards as well.

  He could hear the voices in the distance and, while wizards are always questioning the universe, they mainly direct the questions at other wizards and don’t bother to listen to the answers.

  ‘—certainly saw no trees when we arrived.’

  ‘Probably we didn’t see them because of the rain, and the Senior Wrangler didn’t see them because of Mrs Whitlow. And get a grip on yourself, will you, Dean? I’m sure you’re getting young again! No one’s impressed!’

  ‘I think I must just be naturally youthful, Archchancellor.’

  ‘Nothing to be proud of there! And please, someone, stop the Senior Wrangler getting a grip on hims— Oh, looks like someone’s had a picnic . . .’

  The painter seemed engrossed in his work, and paid them no attention at all.

  ‘I’m sure the Bursar went this way—’

  A little red mud coloured a complex curve and there, as if it had always been there, was a creature with the body of a giant rabbit, the expression of a camel and a tail that a lizard would be proud of. The wizards appeared around the rock just in time to see it scratch its ears.

  ‘Ye gods, what’s that?’

  ‘Some sort of rat?’ said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

  ‘Hey, look, Bursar’s found one of the locals . . .’ The Dean ambled across to the painter, who was watching the wizards with his mouth open. ‘Good morning, fellow. What’s that thing called?’

  The painter followed the pointing finger. ‘Kangaroo?’ he said. The voice was a whisper, on the very cusp of hearing, but the ground trembled.

  ‘Kangaroo, eh?’

  ‘That might not be what it’s called, sir,’ said Ponder. ‘He might just be saying, “I don’t know.”’