Discworld 02 - The Light Fantastic

by Terry Pratchett

  Like a fat man trying to do push-ups the old troll pushed himself upward.

  This wasn’t apparent from where the prisoners were lying. All they knew was that the floor kept rolling under them and that there was a lot of noise going on, most of it unpleasant.

  Weems grabbed Gancia’s arm.

  “It’s a herthquake,” he said. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “Not without that gold,” said Gancia.

  “What?”

  “The gold, the gold. Man, we could be as rich as Creosote!”

  Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it. Gancia’s eyes gleamed more than gold, and he appeared to be staring at Weems’s left ear.

  Weems looked desperately at the Luggage. It was still open invitingly, which was odd—you’d have thought all this shaking would have slammed the lid shut.

  “We’d never carry it,” he suggested. “It’s too heavy,” he added.

  “We’ll damn well carry some of it!” shouted Gancia, and leapt toward the chest as the floor shook again.

  The lid snapped shut. Gancia vanished.

  And just in case Weems thought it was accidental the Luggage’s lid snapped open again, just for a second, and a large tongue as red as mahogany licked across broad teeth as white as sycamore. Then it slammed shut again.

  To Weems’s further horror hundreds of little legs extruded from the underside of the box. It rose very deliberately and, carefully arranging its feet, shuffled around to face him. There was a particularly malevolent look about its keyhole, the sort of look that says “Go on—make my day…”

  He backed away and looked imploringly at Twoflower.

  “I think it might be a good idea if you untied us,” suggested Twoflower. “It’s really quite friendly once it gets to know you.”

  Licking his lips nervously, Weems drew his knife. The Luggage gave a warning creak.

  He slashed through their bonds and stood back quickly.

  “Thank you,” said Twoflower.

  “I think my back’sh gone again,” complained Cohen, as Bethan helped him to his feet.

  “What do we do with this man?” said Bethan.

  “We take hish knife and tell him to bugger off,” said Cohen. “Right?”

  “Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” said Weems, and bolted toward the cavemouth. For a moment he was outlined against the gray predawn sky, and then he vanished. There was a distant cry of “aaargh.”

  The sunlight roared silently across the land like surf. Here and there, where the magic field was slightly weaker, tongues of morning raced ahead of the day, leaving isolated islands of night that contracted and vanished as the bright ocean flowed onward.

  The uplands around the Vortex Plains stood out ahead of the advancing tide like a great gray ship.

  It is possible to stab a troll, but the technique takes practice and no one ever gets a chance to practice more than once. Herrena’s men saw the trolls loom out of the darkness like very solid ghosts. Blades shattered as they hit silica skins, there were one or two brief, flat screams, and then nothing more but shouts far away in the forest as they put as much distance as they could between themselves and the avenging earth.

  Rincewind crept out from behind a tree and looked around. He was alone, but the bushes behind him rustled as the trolls lumbered after the gang.

  He looked up.

  High above him two great crystalline eyes focused in hatred of everything soft and squelchy and, above all, warm. Rincewind cowered in horror as a hand the size of a house rose, curled into a fist, and dropped toward him.

  Day came with a silent explosion of light. For a moment the huge terrifying bulk of Old Grandad was a breakwater of shadow as the daylight streamed past. There was a brief grinding noise.

  There was silence.

  Several minutes passed. Nothing happened.

  A few birds started singing. A bumblebee buzzed over the boulder that was Old Grandad’s fist and alighted on a patch of thyme that had grown under a stone fingernail.

  There was a scuffling down below. Rincewind slid awkwardly out of the narrow gap between the fist and the ground like a snake leaving a burrow.

  He lay on his back, staring up at the sky past the frozen shape of the troll. It hadn’t changed in any way, apart from the stillness, but already the eye started to play tricks. Last night Rincewind had looked at cracks in stone and seen them become mouths and eyes; now he looked at the great cliff face and saw the features become, like magic, mere blemishes in the rock.

  “Wow!” he said.

  That didn’t seem to help. He stood up, dusted himself off, and looked around. Apart from the bumblebee, he was completely alone.

  After poking around for a bit he found a rock that, from certain angles, looked like Beryl.

  He was lost and lonely and a long way from home. He—

  There was a crunch high above him, and shards of rock spattered into the earth. High up on the face of Old Grandad a hole appeared; there was a brief sight of the Luggage’s backside as it struggled to regain its footing, and then Twoflower’s head poked out of the mouth cave.

  “Anyone down there? I say?”

  “Hey!” shouted the wizard. “Am I glad to see you!”

  “I don’t know. Are you?” said Twoflower.

  “Am I what?”

  “Gosh, there’s a wonderful view from up here!”

  It took them half an hour to get down. Fortunately Old Grandad had been quite craggy with plenty of hand-holds, but his nose would have presented a tricky obstacle if it hadn’t been for the luxuriant oak tree that flourished in one nostril.

  The Luggage didn’t bother to climb. It just jumped, and bounced its way down with no apparent harm.

  Cohen sat in the shade, trying to catch his breath and waiting for his sanity to catch up with him. He eyed the Luggage thoughtfully.

  “The horses have all gone,” said Twoflower.

  “We’ll find ’em,” said Cohen. His eyes bored into the Luggage, which began to look embarrassed.

  “They were carrying all our food,” said Rincewind.

  “Plenty of food in the foreshts.”

  “I have some nourishing biscuits in the Luggage,” said Twoflower. “Traveler’s Digestives. Always a comfort in a tight spot.”

  “I’ve tried them,” said Rincewind. “They’ve got a mean edge on them, and—”

  Cohen stood up, wincing.

  “Excushe me,” he said flatly. “There’sh shomething I’ve got to know.”

  He walked over to the Luggage and gripped its lid. The box backed away hurriedly, but Cohen stuck out a skinny foot and tripped up half its legs. As it twisted to snap at him he gritted his teeth and heaved, jerking the Luggage onto its curved lid where it rocked angrily like a maddened tortoise.

  “Hey, that’s my Luggage!” said Twoflower. “Why’s he attacking my Luggage?”

  “I think I know,” said Bethan quietly. “I think it’s because he’s scared of it.”

  Twoflower turned to Rincewind, openmouthed. Rincewind shrugged.

  “Search me,” he said. “I run away from things I’m scared of, myself.”

  With a snap of its lid the Luggage jerked into the air and came down running, catching Cohen a crack on the shins with one of its brass corners. As it wheeled around he got a grip on it just long enough to send it galloping full tilt into a rock.

  “Not bad,” said Rincewind, admiringly.

  The Luggage staggered back, paused for a moment, then came at Cohen waving its lid menacingly. He jumped and landed on it, with both his hands and feet caught in the gap between the box and the lid.

  This severely puzzled the Luggage. It was even more astonished when Cohen took a deep breath and heaved, muscles standing out on his skinny arms like a sock full of coconuts.

  They stood locked there for some time, tendon versus hinge. Occasionally one or other would creak.

  Bethan elbowed Twoflower in the ribs.

  “Do some
thing,” she said.

  “Um,” said Twoflower. “Yes. That’s about enough, I think. Put him down, please.”

  The Luggage gave a creak of betrayal at the sound of its master’s voice. Its lid flew up with such force that Cohen tumbled backward, but he scrambled to his feet and flung himself toward the box.

  Its contents lay open to the skies.

  Cohen reached inside.

  The Luggage creaked a bit, but had obviously weighed up the chances of being sent to the top of that Great Wardrobe in the Sky. When Rincewind dared to peek through his fingers Cohen was peering into the Luggage and cursing under his breath.

  “Laundry?” he shouted. “Is that it? Just laundry?” He was shaking with rage.

  “I think there’s some biscuits too,” said Twoflower in a small voice.

  “But there wash gold! And I shaw it eat shomebody!” Cohen looked imploringly at Rincewind.

  The wizard sighed. “Don’t ask me,” he said. “I don’t own the bloody thing.”

  “I bought it in a shop,” said Twoflower defensively. “I said I wanted a traveling trunk.”

  “That’s what you got, all right,” said Rincewind.

  “It’s very loyal,” said Twoflower.

  “Oh yes,” agreed Rincewind. “If loyalty is what you look for in a suitcase.”

  “Hold on,” said Cohen, who had sagged onto a rock. “Wash it one of thoshe shopsh—I mean, I bet you hadn’t noticed it before and when you went back again it washn’t there?”

  Twoflower brightened. “That’s right!”

  “Shopkeeper a little wizened old guy? Shop full of strange shtuff?”

  “Exactly! Never could find it again, I thought I must have got the wrong street, nothing but a brick wall where I thought it was, I remember thinking at the time it was rather—”

  Cohen shrugged. “One of those shops, * he said. “That explainsh it, then.” He felt his back, and grimaced. “Bloody horshe ran off with my liniment!”

  Rincewind remembered something, and fumbled in the depths of his torn and now very grubby robe. He held up a green bottle.

  “That’sh the shtuff!” said Cohen. “You’re a marvel.” He looked sideways at Twoflower.

  “I would have beaten it,” he said quietly, “even if you hadn’t called it off, I would have beaten it in the end.”

  “That’s right,” said Bethan.

  “You two can make yourshelf usheful,” he added. “That Luggage broke through a troll tooth to get ush out. That wash diamond. Shee if you can find the bitsh. I’ve had an idea about them.”

  As Bethan rolled up her sleeves and uncorked the bottle Rincewind took Twoflower to one side. When they were safely hidden behind a shrub he said, “He’s gone barmy.”

  “That’s Cohen the Barbarian you’re talking about!” said Twoflower, genuinely shocked. “He is the greatest warrior that—”

  “Was,” said Rincewind urgently. “All that stuff with the warrior priests and man-eating zombies was years ago. All he’s got now is memories and so many scars you could play noughts-and-crosses on him.”

  “He is rather more elderly than I imagined, yes,” said Twoflower. He picked up a fragment of diamond.

  “So we ought to leave them and find our horses and move on,” said Rincewind.

  “That’s a bit of a mean trick, isn’t it?”

  “They’ll be all right,” said Rincewind heartily. “The point is, would you feel happy in the company of someone who would attack the Luggage with his bare hands?”

  “That is a point,” said Twoflower.

  “They’ll probably be better off without us anyway.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive,” said Rincewind.

  They found the horses wandering aimlessly in the scrub, breakfasted on badly dried horse jerky, and set off in what Rincewind believed was the right direction. A few minutes later the Luggage emerged from the bushes and followed them.

  The sun rose higher in the sky, but still failed to blot out the light of the star.

  “It’s got bigger overnight,” said Twoflower. “Why isn’t anybody doing something?”

  “Such as what?”

  Twoflower thought. “Couldn’t somebody tell Great A’Tuin to avoid it?” he said. “Sort of go around it?”

  “That sort of thing has been tried before,” said Rincewind. “Wizards tried to tune in to Great A’Tuin’s mind.”

  “It didn’t work?”

  “Oh, it worked all right,” said Rincewind. “Only…”

  Only there had been certain unforeseen risks in reading a mind as great as the World Turtle’s, he explained. The wizards had trained up on tortoises and giant sea turtles first, to get the hang of the chelonian frame of mind, but although they knew that Great A’Tuin’s mind would be big they hadn’t realized that it would be slow.

  “There’s a bunch of wizards that have been reading it in shifts for thirty years,” said Rincewind. “All they’ve found out is that Great A’Tuin is looking forward to something.”

  “What?”

  “Who knows?”

  They rode in silence for a while through a rough country where huge limestone blocks lined the track. Eventually Twoflower said, “We ought to go back, you know.”

  “Look, we’ll reach the Smarl tomorrow,” said Rincewind. “Nothing will happen to them out here, I don’t see why—”

  He was talking to himself. Twoflower had wheeled his horse and was trotting back, demonstrating all the horsemanship of a sack of potatoes.

  Rincewind looked down. The Luggage regarded him owlishly.

  “What are you looking at?” said the wizard. “He can go back if he wants, why should I bother?”

  The Luggage said nothing.

  “Look, he’s not my responsibility,” said Rincewind. “Let’s be absolutely clear about that.”

  The Luggage said nothing, but louder this time.

  “Go on—follow him. You’re nothing to do with me.”

  The Luggage retracted its little legs and settled down on the track.

  “Well, I’m going,” said Rincewind. “I mean it,” he added.

  He turned the horse’s head back toward the new horizon, and glanced down. The Luggage sat there.

  “It’s no good trying to appeal to my better nature. You can stay there all day for all I care. I’m just going to ride off, okay?”

  He glared at the Luggage. The Luggage looked back.

  “I thought you’d come back,” said Twoflower.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” said Rincewind.

  “Shall we talk about something else?”

  “Yeah, well, discussing how to get these ropes off would be favorite,” said Rincewind. He wrenched at the bonds around his wrists.

  “I can’t imagine why you’re so important,” said Herrena. She sat on a rock opposite them, sword across her knees. Most of the gang laying among the rocks high above, watching the road. Rincewind and Twoflower had been a pathetically easy ambush.

  “Weems told me what your box did to Gancia,” she added. “I can’t say that’s a great loss, but I hope it understands that if it comes within a mile of us I will personally cut both your throats, yes?”

  Rincewind nodded violently.

  “Good,” said Herrena. “You’re wanted dead or alive, I’m not really bothered which, but some of the lads might want to have a little discussion with you about those trolls. If the sun hadn’t come up when it did—”

  She left the words hanging, and walked away.

  “Well, here’s another fine mess,” said Rincewind. He had another pull at the ropes that bound him. There was a rock behind him, and if he could bring his wrists up—yes, as he thought, it lacerated him while at the same time being too blunt to have any effect on the rope.

  “But why us?” said Twoflower. “It’s to do with that star, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know anything about the star,” said Rincewind. “I never even attended astrology lessons at the Univer
sity!”

  “I expect everything will turn out all right in the end,” said Twoflower.

  Rincewind looked at him. Remarks like that always threw him.

  “Do you really believe that?” he said. “I mean, really?”

  “Well, things generally do work out satisfactorily, when you come to think about it.”

  “If you think the total disruption of my life for the last year is satisfactory then you might be right. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve nearly been killed—”

  “Twenty-seven,” said Twoflower.

  “What?”

  “Twenty-seven times,” said Twoflower helpfully. “I worked it out. But you never actually have.”

  “What? Worked it out?” said Rincewind, who was beginning to have the familiar feeling that the conversation had been mugged.

  “No. Been killed. Doesn’t that seem a bit suspicious?”

  “I’ve never objected to it, if that’s what you mean,” said Rincewind. He glared at his feet. Twoflower was right, of course. The Spell was keeping him alive, it was obvious. No doubt if he jumped over a cliff a passing cloud would cushion his fall.

  The trouble with that theory, he decided, was that it only worked if he didn’t believe it was true. The moment he thought he was invulnerable he’d be dead.

  So, on the whole it was wisest not to think about it at all.

  Anyway, he might be wrong.

  The only thing he could be certain of was that he was getting a headache. He hoped that the Spell was somewhere in the area of the headache and really suffering.

  When they rode out of the hollow both Rincewind and Twoflower were sharing a horse with one of their captors. Rincewind perched uncomfortably in front of Weems, who had sprained an ankle and was not in a good mood. Twoflower sat in front of Herrena which, since he was fairly short, meant that at least he kept his ears warm. She rode with a drawn knife and a sharp eye out for any walking boxes; Herrena hadn’t quite worked out what the Luggage was, but she was bright enough to know that it wouldn’t let Twoflower be killed.

  After about ten minutes they saw it in the middle of the road. Its lid lay open invitingly. It was full of gold.

  “Go around it,” said Herrena.

  “But—”