Discworld 05 - Sourcery

by Terry Pratchett

  Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.

  For example, the weird dream about a lead doughnut on a mile-high gantry, which in the right mind would have been the catalyst for the invention of repressed-gravitational electricity generation (a cheap and inexhaustible and totally non-polluting form of power which the world in question had been seeking for centuries, and for the lack of which it was plunged into a terrible and pointless war) was in fact had by a small and bewildered duck.

  By another stroke of bad luck, the sight of a herd of white horses galloping through a field of wild hyacinths would have led a struggling composer to write the famous Flying God Suite, bringing succour and balm to the souls of millions, had he not been at home in bed with shingles. The inspiration therefore fell to a nearby frog, who was not in much of a position to make a startling contribution to the field of tone poetry.

  Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

  And so Creosote, who had dreamt the inspiration for a rather fine poem about life and philosophy and how they both look much better through the bottom of a wine glass, was totally unable to do anything about it because he had as much poetic ability as a hyena.

  Why the gods allow this sort of thing to continue is a mystery.

  Actually, the flash of inspiration needed to explain it clearly and precisely has taken place, but the creature who received it—a small female bluetit—has never been able to make the position clear, even after some really strenuous coded messages on the tops of milk bottles. By a strange coincidence, a philosopher who had been devoting some sleepless nights to the same mystery woke up that morning with a wonderful new idea for getting peanuts out of bird tables.

  Which brings us rather neatly onto the subject of magic.

  A long way out in the dark gulfs of interstellar space, one single inspiration particle is clipping along unaware of its destiny, which is just as well, because its destiny is to strike, in a matter of hours, a tiny area of Rincewind’s mind.

  It would be a tough destiny even if Rincewind’s creative node was a reasonable size, but the particle’s karma had handed it the problem of hitting a moving target the size of a small raisin over a distance of several hundred lightyears. Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.

  If it pulls it off, however, Rincewind will have a serious philosophic idea. If it doesn’t, a nearby brick will have an important insight which it will be totally unequipped to deal with.

  The Seriph’s palace, known to legend as the Rhoxie, occupied most of the center of Al Khali that wasn’t occupied by the wilderness. Most things connected with Creosote were famed in mythology and the arched, domed, many-pillared palace was said to have more rooms than any man had been able to count. Rincewind didn’t know which number he was in.

  “It’s magic, isn’t it?” said Abrim the vizier.

  He prodded Rincewind in the ribs.

  “You’re a wizard,” he said. “Tell me what it does.”

  “How do you know I’m a wizard?” said Rincewind desperately.

  “It’s written on your hat,” said the vizier.

  “Ah.”

  “And you were on the boat with it. My men saw you.”

  “The Seriph employs slavers?” snapped Conina. “That doesn’t sound very simple!”

  “Oh, I employ the slavers. I am the vizier, after all,” said Abrim. “It is rather expected of me.”

  He gazed thoughtfully at the girl, and then nodded at a couple of the guards.

  “The current Seriph is rather literary in his views,” he said. “I, on the other hand, am not. Take her to the seraglio, although,” he rolled his eyes and gave an irritable sigh, “I’m sure the only fate that awaits her there is boredom, and possibly a sore throat.”

  He turned to Rincewind.

  “Don’t say anything,” he said. “Don’t move your hands. Don’t try any sudden feats of magic. I am protected by strange and powerful amulets.”

  “Now just hold on a minute—” Rincewind began, and Conina said, “All right. I’ve always wondered what a harem looked like.”

  Rincewind’s mouth went on opening and shutting, but no sounds came out. Finally he managed, “Have you?”

  She waggled an eyebrow at him. It was probably a signal of some sort. Rincewind felt he ought to have understood it, but peculiar passions were stirring in the depths of his being. They weren’t actually going to make him brave, but they were making him angry. Speeded up, the dialogue behind his eyes was going something like this:

  Ugh.

  Who’s that?

  Your conscience. I feel terrible. Look, they’re marching her off to the harem.

  Rather her than me, thought Rincewind, but without much conviction.

  Do something!

  There’s too many guards! They’ll kill me!

  So they’ll kill you, it’s not the end of the world.

  It will be for me, thought Rincewind grimly.

  But just think how good you’ll feel in your next life—

  Look, just shut up, will I? I’ve had just about enough of me.

  Abrim stepped across to Rincewind and looked at him curiously.

  “Who are you talking to?” he said.

  “I warn you,” said Rincewind, between clenched teeth, “I have this magical box on legs which is absolutely merciless with attackers, one word from me and—”

  “I’m impressed,” said Abrim. “Is it invisible?”

  Rincewind risked a look behind him.

  “I’m sure I had it when I came in,” he said, and sagged.

  It would be mistaken to say the Luggage was nowhere to be seen. It was somewhere to be seen, it was just that the place wasn’t anywhere near Rincewind.

  Abrim walked slowly around the table on which sat the hat, twirling his mustache.

  “Once again,” he said, “I ask you: this is an artifact of power, I feel it, and you must tell me what it does.”

  “Why don’t you ask it?” said Rincewind.

  “It refuses to tell me.”

  “Well, why do you want to know?”

  Abrim laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it.

  “You’re a wizard,” he said. “Wizardry is about power. I have taken an interest in magic myself. I have the talent, you know.” The vizier drew himself up stiffly. “Oh, yes. But they wouldn’t accept me at your University. They said I was mentally unstable, can you believe that?”

  “No,” said Rincewind, truthfully. Most of the wizards at Unseen had always seemed to him to be several bricks short of a shilling. Abrim seemed pretty normal wizard material.

  Abrim gave him an encouraging smile.

  Rincewind looked sideways at the hat. It said nothing. He looked back at the vizier. If the laughter had been weird, the smile made it sound as normal as birdsong. It looked as though the vizier had learned it from diagrams.

  “Wild horses wouldn’t get me to help you in any way,” he said.

  “Ah,” said the vizier. “A challenge.” He beckoned to the nearest guard.

  “Do we have any wild horses in the stables?”

  “Some fairly angry ones, master.”

  “Infuriate four of them and take them to the turnwise courtyard. And, oh, bring several lengths of chain.”

  “Right away, master.”

  “Um. Look,” said Rincewind.

  “Yes?” said Abrim.

  “Well, if you put it like that…”

  “You wish to make a point?”

  “It’s the Archchancellor’s hat, if you must know,” said Rincewind. “The symbol of wizardry.”

  “Powerful?”

&nbs
p; Rincewind shivered. “Very,” he said.

  “Why is it called the Archchancellor’s hat?”

  “The Archchancellor is the most senior wizard, you see. The leader. But, look—”

  Abrim picked up the hat and turned it around and around in his hands.

  “It is, you might say, the symbol of office?”

  “Absolutely, but look, if you put it on, I’d better warn you—”

  Shut up.

  Abrim leapt back, the hat dropping to the floor.

  The wizard knows nothing. Send him away. We must negotiate.

  The vizier stared down at the glittering octarines around the hat.

  “I negotiate? With an item of apparel?”

  I have much to offer, on the right head.

  Rincewind was appalled. It has already been indicated that he had the kind of instinct for danger usually found only in certain small rodents, and it was currently battering on the side of his skull in an attempt to run away and hide somewhere.

  “Don’t listen!” he shouted.

  Put me on, said the hat beguilingly, in an ancient voice that sounded as though the speaker had a mouthful of felt.

  If there really was a school for viziers, Abrim had come top of the class.

  “We’ll talk first,” he said. He nodded at the guards, and pointed to Rincewind.

  “Take him away and throw him in the spider tank,” he said.

  “No, not spiders, on top of everything else!” moaned Rincewind.

  The captain of the guard stepped forward and knuckled his forehead respectfully.

  “Run out of spiders, master,” he said.

  “Oh.” The vizier looked momentarily blank. “In that case, lock him in the tiger cage.”

  The guard hesitated, trying to ignore the sudden outburst of whimpering beside him. “The tiger’s been ill, master. Backward and forward all night.”

  “Then throw this snivelling coward down the shaft of eternal fire!”

  A couple of the guards exchanged glances over the head of Rincewind, who had sunk to his knees.

  “Ah. We’ll need a bit of notice of that, master—”

  “—to get it going again, like.”

  The vizier’s fist came down hard on the table. The captain of the guard brightened up horribly.

  “There’s the snake pit, master,” he said. The other guards nodded. There was always the snake pit.

  Four heads turned toward Rincewind, who stood up and brushed the sand off his knees.

  “How do you feel about snakes?” said one of the guards.

  “Snakes? I don’t like snakes much—”

  “The snake pit,” said Abrim.

  “Right. The snake pit,” agreed the guards.

  “—I mean, some snakes are okay—” Rincewind continued, as two guards grabbed him by the elbows.

  In fact there was only one very cautious snake, which remained obstinately curled up in a corner of the shadowy pit watching Rincewind suspiciously, possibly because he reminded it of a mongoose.

  “Hi,” it said eventually. “Are you a wizard?”

  As a line of snake dialogue this was a considerable improvement on the normal string of esses, but Rincewind was sufficiently despondent not to waste time wondering and simply replied, “It’s on my hat, can’t you read?”

  “In seventeen languages, actually. I taught myself.”

  “Really?”

  “I sent off for courses. But I try not to read, of course. It’s not in character.”

  “I suppose it wouldn’t be.” It was certainly the most cultured snake voice that Rincewind had ever heard.

  “It’s the same with the voice, I’m afraid,” the snake added. “I shouldn’t really be talking to you now. Not like this, anyway. I suppose I could grunt a bit. I rather think I should be trying to kill you, in fact.”

  “I have curious and unusual powers,” said Rincewind. Fair enough, he thought, an almost total inability to master any form of magic is pretty unusual for a wizard and anyway, it doesn’t matter about lying to a snake.

  “Gosh. Well, I expect you won’t be in here long, then.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I expect you’ll be levitating out of here like a shot, any minute.”

  Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.

  “I might,” he said cautiously.

  “In that case, you wouldn’t mind taking me with you, would you?”

  “Eh?”

  “It’s a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it’s the pits.”

  “Take you? But you’re a snake, it’s your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things.”

  A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.

  “That’s a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone,” it said.

  The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.

  It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.

  To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word “emaciated.” He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.

  Rincewind looked again.

  He had been right the first time.

  The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes—a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, you’d see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you’d never see another one wearing—

  The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.

  “I can’t help it,” he said. “I promised my mother.”

  “Woolly underwear?”

  Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city’s astronomers, but that wasn’t the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn’t the strangest thing.

  The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.

  The occupants watched it for some time, sipping their coffee laced with desert orakh. This drink, made from cacti sap and scorpion venom, is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe, but the desert nomads don’t drink it for its intoxicating effects. They use it because they need something to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee.

  Not because you could use the coffee to waterproof roofs. Not because it went through the untrained stomach lining like a hot ball bearing through runny butter. What it did was worse.

  It made you knurd.*

  The sons of the desert glanced suspiciously into their thimble-sized coffee-cups, and wondered whether they had overdone the orakh. Were they all seeing the same thing? Would it be foolish to pass a remark? These are the sort of things you need to worry about if you want to retain any credibility as a steely-eyed son of the deep desert. Pointing a shaking finger and saying, “Hey, look, a box just walked in here on hundreds of little legs, isn’t that extraordinary!” would show a terrible and possibly fatal lack of machismo.

  The drinkers tried not to catch one another’s eye, even when the Luggage slid up to the row of orakh jars against the far wall. The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.

  Finally one of them said, “I think it wants a drink.”

  There was a long silence, and then one of the others said, with the precision of a chess Grand Master making a killing move, “What does?”

  The rest of the drinkers gazed impassively into their glasses.

  There was no sound for a while
other than the plopplopping of a gecko’s footsteps across the sweating ceiling.

  The first drinker said, “The demon that’s just moved up behind you is what I was referring to, O brother of the sands.”

  The current holder of the All-Wadi Imperturbability Championship smiled glassily until he felt a tugging on his robe. The smile stayed where it was but the rest of his face didn’t seem to want to be associated with it.

  The Luggage was feeling crossed in love and was doing what any sensible person would do in these circumstances, which was get drunk. It had no money and no way of asking for what it wanted, but the Luggage somehow never had much difficulty in making itself understood.

  The tavern keeper spent a very long lonely night filling a saucer with orakh, before the Luggage rather unsteadily walked out through one of the walls.

  The desert was silent. It wasn’t normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the hell out of it.

  “I promised my mother,” said the boy. “I get these colds, you see.”

  “Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. You’ve got to wear all this leather stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t call it all,” said Rincewind. “There’s not enough of it to call it all. Why have you got to wear it?”

  “So people know I’m a barbarian hero, of course.”

  Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.

  Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.

  Barbarian hero,” he murmured.

  “It’s all right, isn’t it? All this leather stuff was very expensive.”

  “Yes, but, look—what’s your name, lad?”