Then you’ve got nothing to lose, have you? his libido put in, in an oily tone of thought.
It was at this point Rincewind realized that something important was missing. It took him a little while to realize what it was.
No one had tried to sell him anything for several minutes. In Al Khali, that probably meant you were dead.
He, Conina and the Luggage were alone in a long, shady alley. He could hear the bustle of the city some way away, but immediately around them there was nothing except a rather expectant silence.
“They’ve run off,” said Conina.
“Are we going to be attacked?”
“Could be. There’s been three men following us on the rooftops.”
Rincewind squinted upwards at almost the same time as three men, dressed in flowing black robes, dropped lightly into the alleyway in front of them. When he looked around two more appeared from around a corner. All five were holding long curved swords and, although the lower halves of their faces were masked, it was almost certain that they were grinning evilly.
Rincewind rapped sharply on the Luggage’s lid.
“Kill,” he suggested. The Luggage stood stock still for a moment, and then plodded over and stood next to Conina. It looked slightly smug and, Rincewind realized with jealous horror, rather embarrassed.
“Why, you—” he growled, and gave it a kick—“you handbag.”
He sidled closer to the girl, who was standing there with a thoughtful smile on her face.
“What now?” he said. “Are you going to offer them all a quick perm?”
The men edged a little closer. They were, he noticed, only interested in Conina.
“I’m not armed,” she said.
“What happened to your legendary comb?”
“Left it on the boat.”
“You’ve got nothing?”
Conina shifted slightly to keep as many of the men as possible in her field of vision.
“I’ve got a couple of hairclips,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
“Any good?”
“Don’t know. Never tried.”
“You got us into this!”
“Relax. I think they’ll just take us prisoner.”
“Oh, that’s fine for you to say. You’re not marked down as this week’s special offer.”
The Luggage snapped its lid once or twice, a little uncertain about things. One of the men gingerly extended his sword and prodded Rincewind in the small of the back.
“They want to take us somewhere, see?” said Conina. She gritted her teeth. “Oh, no,” she muttered.
“What’s the matter now?”
“I can’t do it!”
“What?”
Conina put her head in her hands. “I can’t let myself be taken prisoner without a fight! I can feel a thousand barbarian ancestors accusing me of betrayal!” she hissed urgently.
“Pull the other one.”
“No, really. This won’t take a minute.”
There was a sudden blur and the nearest man collapsed in a small gurgling heap. Then Conina’s elbows went back and into the stomachs of the men behind her. Her left hand rebounded past Rincewind’s ear with a noise like tearing silk and felled the man behind him. The fifth made a run for it and was brought down by a flying tackle, hitting his head heavily on the wall.
Conina rolled off him and sat up, panting, her eyes bright.
“I don’t like to say this, but I feel better for that,” she said. “It’s terrible to know that I betrayed a fine hairdressing tradition, of course. Oh.”
“Yes,” said Rincewind somberly, “I wondered if you’d noticed them.”
Conina’s eyes scanned the line of bowmen who had appeared along the opposite wall. They had that stolid, impassive look of people who have been paid to do a job, and don’t much mind if the job involves killing people.
“Time for those hairclips,” said Rincewind.
Conina didn’t move.
“My father always said that it was pointless to undertake a direct attack against an enemy extensively armed with efficient projectile weapons,” she said.
Rincewind, who knew Cohen’s normal method of speech, gave her a look of disbelief.
“Well, what he actually said,” she added, “was never enter an arse-kicking contest with a porcupine.”
Spelter couldn’t face breakfast.
He wondered whether he ought to talk to Carding, but he had a chilly feeling that the old wizard wouldn’t listen and wouldn’t believe him anyway. In fact he wasn’t quite sure he believed it himself…
Yes he was. He’d never forget it, although he intended to make every effort.
One of the problems about living in the University these days was that the building you went to sleep in probably wasn’t the same building when you woke up. Rooms had a habit of changing and moving around, a consequence of all this random magic. It built up in the carpets, charging up the wizards to such an extent that shaking hands with somebody was a sure-fire way of turning them into something. The build up of magic, in fact, was overflowing the capacity of the area to hold it. If something wasn’t done about it soon, then even the common people would be able to use it—a chilling thought but, since Spelter’s mind was already so full of chilling thoughts you could use it as an ice tray, not one he was going to spend much time worrying about.
Mere household geography wasn’t the only difficulty, though. Sheer pressure of thaumaturgical inflow was even affecting the food. What was a forkful of kedgeree when you lifted it off the plate might well have turned into something else by the time it entered your mouth. If you were lucky, it was inedible. If you were unlucky, it was edible but probably not something you liked to think you were about to eat or, worse, had already eaten half of.
Spelter found Coin in what had been, late last night, a broom cupboard. It was a lot bigger now. It was only because Spelter had never heard of aircraft hangars that he didn’t know what to compare it with, although, to be fair, very few aircraft hangars have marble floors and a lot of statuary around the place. A couple of brooms and a small battered bucket in one corner looked distinctly out of place, but not as out of place as the crushed tables in the former Great Hall which, owing to the surging tides of magic now flowing through the place, had shrunk to the approximate size of what Spelter, if he had ever seen one, would have called a small telephone booth.
He sidled into the room with extreme caution and took his place among the council of wizards. The air was greasy with the feel of power.
Spelter created a chair beside Carding and leaned across to him.
“You’ll never believe—” he began.
“Quiet!” hissed Carding. “This is amazing!”
Coin was sitting on his stool in the middle of the circle, one hand on his staff, the other extended and holding something small, white and egg-like. It was strangely fuzzy. In fact, Spelter thought, it wasn’t something small seen close to. It was something huge, but a long way off. And the boy was holding it in his hand.
“What’s he doing?” Spelter whispered.
“I’m not exactly sure,” murmured Carding. “As far as we can understand it, he’s creating a new home for wizardry.”
Streamers of colored light flashed about the indistinct ovoid, like a distant thunderstorm. The glow lit Coin’s preoccupied face from below, giving it the semblance of a mask.
“I don’t see how we will all fit in,” the bursar said. “Carding, last night I saw—”
“It is finished,” said Coin. He held up the egg, which flashed occasionally from some inner light and gave off tiny white prominences. Not only was it a long way off, Spelter thought, it was also extremely heavy; it went right through heaviness and out the other side, into that strange negative realism where lead would be a vacuum. He grabbed Carding’s sleeve again.
“Carding, listen, it’s important, listen, when I looked in—”
“I really wish you’d stop doing that.”
“But
the staff, his staff, it’s not—”
Coin stood up and pointed the staff at the wall, where a doorway instantly appeared. He marched out through it, leaving the wizards to follow him.
He went through the Archchancellor’s garden, followed by a gaggle of wizards in the same way that a comet is followed by its tail, and didn’t stop until he reached the banks of the Ankh. There were some hoary old willows here, and the river flowed, or at any rate moved, in a horseshoe bend around a small newthaunted meadow known rather optimistically as Wizards Pleasaunce. On summer evenings, if the wind was blowing toward the river, it was a nice area for an afternoon stroll.
The warm silver haze still hung over the city as Coin padded through the damp grass until he reached the center. He tossed the egg, which drifted in a gentle arc and landed with a squelch.
He turned to the wizards as they hurried up.
“Stand well back,” he commanded. “And be prepared to run.”
He pointed the octiron staff at the half-sunken thing. A bolt of octarine light shot from its tip and struck the egg, exploding into a shower of sparks that left blue and purple after-images.
There was a pause. A dozen wizards watched the egg expectantly.
A breeze shook the willow trees in a totally unmysterious way.
Nothing else happened.
“Er—” Spelter began.
And then came the first tremor. A few leaves fell out of the trees and some distant water bird took off in fright.
The sound started as a low groaning, experienced rather than heard, as though everyone’s feet had suddenly become their ears. The trees trembled, and so did one or two wizards.
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 grew through the air, linking tower with tower.
Spelter whimpered when the soil flowed away from around his feet, and was replaced by flagstones flecked with silver. He lurched as the floor rose inexorably, carrying the three high above the treetops.
The rooftops of the University went past and fell away below them. Ankh-Morpork spread out like a map, the river a trapped snake, the plains a misty blur. Spelter’s ears popped, but the climb went on, into the clouds.
They emerged drenched and cold into blistering sunlight with the cloud cover spreading away in every direction. Other towers were rising around them, glinting painfully in the sharpness of the day.
Carding knelt down awkwardly and felt the floor gingerly. He signalled to Spelter to do the same.
Spelter touched a surface that was smoother than stone. It felt like ice would feel if ice was slightly warm, and looked like ivory. While it wasn’t exactly transparent, it gave the impression that it would like to be.
He got the distinct feeling that, if he closed his eyes, he wouldn’t be able to feel it at all.
He met Carding’s gaze.
“Don’t look at, um, me,” he said. “I don’t know what it is either.”
They looked up at Coin, who said: “It’s magic.”
“Yes, lord, but what is it made of?” said Carding.
“It is made of magic. Raw magic. Solidified. Curdled. Renewed from second to second. Could you imagine a better substance to build the new home of sourcery?”
The staff flared for a moment, melting the clouds. The Discworld appeared below them, and from up here you could see that it was indeed a disc, pinned to the sky by the central mountain of Cori Celesti, where the gods lived. There was the Circle Sea, so close that it might even be possible to dive into it from here; there was the vast continent of Klatch, squashed by perspective. The Rimfall around the edge of the world was a sparkling curve.
“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 toward 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 toward 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 onto 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 colored 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 advisors will be accorded all due status.”
Carding’s knuckles whitened, but he shrugged.
“There is little to say,” he said. “What good is a candle at noonday?”
Coin turned to Spelter. So did the staff. The filigree carvings were regarding him coldly. One of them, near the top of the staff, looked unpleasantly like an eyebrow.
“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 toward 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.”
Midnight strutted its black stuff along the corridors of Unseen University as Spelter, with rather less confidence, crept cautiously toward the impassive doors of the Library. He knocked, and the sound echoed so loudly in the empty building that he had to lean against the wall and wait for his heart to slow down a bit.
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 me do it, it’s that staff, um, it knows everything that’s going on, it knows that I know about it…please help me…”
“Oook?”
“The other night, I looked into his room…the staff, the staff was glowing, it was standing there in the middle of the room like a beacon and the boy was on the bed sobbing, I could feel it reaching out, teaching him, whispering terrible things, and then it noticed me, you’ve got to help me, you’re the only one who isn’t under the—”
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.
Discworld 05 - Sourcery Page 11
