Discworld 05 - Sourcery

by Terry Pratchett

  “You do it very well,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You said you were frightened of heights.”

  “Terrified.”

  “You don’t show it.”

  “I’m not thinking about it.”

  Rincewind turned and looked at the tower behind them. It had grown quite a lot in the last minute, blossoming at the top into a complexity of turrets and battlements. A swarm of tiles was hovering over it, individual tiles swooping down and clinking into place like ceramic bees on a bombing run. It was impossibly high—the stones at the bottom would have been crushed if it wasn’t for the magic that crackled through them.

  Well, that was just about it as far as organized wizardry was concerned. Two thousand years of peaceful magic had gone down the drain, the towers were going up again, and with all this new raw magic floating around something was going to get very seriously hurt. Probably the universe. Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn’t good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.

  And, of course, it would be impossible to explain things to his companions. They didn’t seem to grasp ideas properly; more particularly, they didn’t seem able to get the hang of doom. They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.

  The whole point about the old University organization was that it kept a sort of peace between wizards who got along with one another about as easily as cats in a sack, and now the gloves were off anyone who tried to interfere was going to end up severely scratched. This wasn’t the old, gentle, rather silly magic that the Disc was used to; this was magic war, white-hot and searing.

  Rincewind wasn’t very good at precognition; in fact he could barely see into the present. But he knew with weary certainty that at some point in the very near future, like thirty seconds or so, someone would say: “Surely there’s something we could do?”

  The desert passed below them, lit by the low rays of the setting sun.

  “There don’t seem to be many stars,” said Nijel. “Perhaps they’re scared to come out.”

  Rincewind looked up. There was a silver haze high in the air.

  “It’s raw magic settling out of the atmosphere,” he said. “It’s saturated.”

  Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twen—

  “Surely there’s—” Conina began.

  “There isn’t,” said Rincewind flatly, but with just the faintest twinge of satisfaction. “The wizards will fight each other until there’s one victor. There isn’t anything anyone else can do.”

  “I could do with a drink,” said Creosote. “I suppose we couldn’t stop somewhere where I could buy an inn?”

  “What with?” said Nijel. “You’re poor, remember?”

  “Poor I don’t mind,” said the Seriph. “It’s sobriety that is giving me difficulties.”

  Conina prodded Rincewind gently in the ribs.

  “Are you steering this thing?” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then where is it going?”

  Nijel peered downwards.

  “By the look of it,” he said, “it’s going hubwards. Towards the Circle Sea.”

  “Someone must be guiding it.”

  Hallo, said a friendly voice in Rincewind’s head.

  You’re not my conscience again, are you? thought Rincewind.

  I’m feeling really bad.

  Well, I’m sorry, Rincewind thought, but none of this is my fault. I’m just a victim of circuses. I don’t see why I should take the blame.

  Yes, but you could do something about it.

  Like what?

  You could destroy the sourcerer. All this would collapse then.

  I wouldn’t stand a chance.

  Then at least you could die in the attempt. That might be preferable to letting magical war break out.

  “Look, just shut up, will you?” said Rincewind.

  “What?” said Conina.

  “Um?” said Rincewind, vaguely. He looked down blankly at the blue and gold pattern underneath him, and added, “You’re flying this, aren’t you? Through me! That’s sneaky!”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Oh. Sorry. Talking to myself.”

  “I think,” said Conina, “that we’d better land.”

  They glided down toward a crescent of beach where the desert reached the sea. In a normal light it would have been blinding white with a sand made up of billions of tiny shell fragments, but at this time of day it was blood-red and primordial. Ranks of driftwood, carved by the waves and bleached by the sun, were piled up on the tideline like the bones of ancient fish or the biggest floral art accessory counter in the universe. Nothing stirred, apart from the waves. There were a few rocks around, but they were firebrick hot and home to no mollusc or seaweed.

  Even the sea looked arid. If any proto-amphibian emerged onto a beach like this, it would have given up there and then, gone back into the water and told all its relatives to forget the legs, it wasn’t worth it. The air felt as though it had been cooked in a sock.

  Even so, Nijel insisted that they light a fire.

  “It’s more friendly,” he said. “Besides, there could be monsters.”

  Conina looked at the oily wavelets, rolling up the beach in what appeared to be a half-hearted attempt to get out of the sea.

  “In that?” she said.

  “You never can tell.”

  Rincewind mooched along the waterline, distractedly picking up stones and throwing them in the sea. One or two were thrown back.

  After a while Conina got a fire going, and the bone-dry, salt-saturated wood sent blue and green flames roaring up under a fountain of sparks. The wizard went and sat in the dancing shadows, his back against a pile of whitened wood, wrapped in a cloud of such impenetrable gloom that even Creosote stopped complaining of thirst and shut up.

  Conina woke up after midnight. There was a crescent moon on the horizon and a thin, chilly mist covered the sand. Creosote was snoring on his back. Nijel, who was theoretically on guard, was sound asleep.

  Conina lay perfectly still, every sense seeking out the thing that had awaken her.

  Finally she heard it again. It was a tiny, diffident clinking noise, barely audible above the muted slurp of the sea.

  She got up, or rather, she slid into the vertical as bonelessly as a jellyfish, and flicked Nijel’s sword out of his unresisting hand. Then she sidled through the mist without causing so much as an extra swirl.

  The fire sank down further into its bed of ash. After a while Conina came back, and shook the other two awake.

  “Warrizit?”

  “I think you ought to see this,” she hissed. “I think it could be important.”

  “I just shut my eyes for a second—” Nijel protested.

  “Never mind about that. Come on.”

  Creosote squinted around the impromptu campsite.

  “Where’s the wizard fellow?”

  “You’ll see. And don’t make a noise. It could be dangerous.”

  They stumbled after her knee-deep in vapor, toward the sea.

  Eventually Nijel said, “Why dangerous—”

  “Shh! Did you hear it?”

  Nijel listened.

  “Like a sort of ringing noise?”

  “Watch…”

  Rincewind walked jerkily up the beach, carrying a large round rock in both hands. He walked past them without a word, his eyes staring straight ahead.

  They followed him along the cold beach until he reached a bare area between the dunes, where he stopped and, still moving with all the grace of a clothes horse, dropped the rock. It made a clinking noise.

  There was a wide circle of other stones. Very few of them had actually stayed on top of another one.

  The three of them crouched down and
watched him.

  “Is he asleep?” said Creosote.

  Conina nodded.

  “What’s he trying to do?”

  “I think he’s trying to build a tower.”

  Rincewind lurched back into the ring of stones and, with great care, placed another rock on empty air. It fell down.

  “He’s not very good at it, is he,” said Nijel.

  “It is very sad,” said Creosote.

  “Maybe we ought to wake him up,” said Conina. “Only I heard that if you wake up sleepwalkers their legs fall off, or something. What do you think?”

  “Could be risky, with wizards,” said Nijel.

  They tried to make themselves comfortable on the chilly sand.

  “It’s rather pathetic, isn’t it?” said Creosote. “It’s not as if he’s really a proper wizard.”

  Conina and Nijel tried to avoid one another’s gaze. Finally the boy coughed, and said, “I’m not exactly a barbarian hero, you know. You may have noticed.”

  They watched the toiling figure of Rincewind for a while, and then Conina said, “If it comes to that, I think I lack a certain something when it comes to hairdressing.”

  They both stared fixedly at the sleepwalker, busy with their own thoughts and red with mutual embarrassment.

  Creosote cleared his throat.

  “If it makes anyone feel better,” he said, “I sometimes perceive that my poetry leaves a lot to be desired.”

  Rincewind carefully tried to balance a large rock on a small pebble. It fell off, but he appeared to be happy with the result.

  “Speaking as a poet,” said Conina carefully, “what would you say about this situation?”

  Creosote shifted uneasily. “Funny old thing, life,” he said.

  “Pretty apt.”

  Nijel lay back and looked up at the hazy stars. Then he sat bolt upright.

  “Did you see that?” he demanded.

  “What?”

  “It was a sort of flash, a kind of—”

  The hubward horizon exploded into a silent flower of color, which expanded rapidly through all the hues of the conventional spectrum before flashing into brilliant octarine. It etched itself on their eyeballs before fading away.

  After a while there was a distant rumble.

  “Some sort of magical weapon,” said Conina, blinking. A gust of warm wind picked up the mist and streamed it past them.

  “Blow this,” said Nijel, getting to his feet. “I’m going to wake him up, even if it means we end up carrying him.”

  He reached out for Rincewind’s shoulder just as something went past very high overhead, making a noise like a flock of geese on nitrous oxide. It disappeared into the desert behind them. Then there was a sound that would have set false teeth on edge, a flash of green light, and a thump.

  “I’ll wake him up,” said Conina. “You get the carpet.”

  She clambered over the ring of rocks and took the sleeping wizard gently by the arm, and this would have been a textbook way of waking a somnambulist if Rincewind hadn’t dropped the rock he was carrying on his foot.

  He opened his eyes.

  “Where am I?” he said.

  “On the beach. You’ve been…er…dreaming.”

  Rincewind blinked at the mist, the sky, the circle of stones, Conina, the circle of stones again, and finally back at the sky.

  “What’s been happening?” he said.

  “Some sort of magical fireworks.”

  “Oh. It’s started, then.”

  He lurched unsteadily out of the circle, in a way that suggested to Conina that perhaps he wasn’t quite awake yet, and staggered back toward the remains of the fire. He walked a few steps and then appeared to remember something.

  He looked down at his foot, and said, “Ow.”

  He’d almost reached the fire when the blast from the last spell reached them. It had been aimed at the tower in Al Khali, which was twenty miles away, and by now the wavefront was extremely diffuse. It was hardly affecting the nature of things as it surged over the dunes with a faint sucking noise; the fire burned red and green for a second, one of Nijel’s sandals turned into a small and irritated badger, and a pigeon flew out of the Seriph’s turban.

  Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.

  “What was that?” said Nijel. He kicked the badger, who was sniffing at his foot.

  “Hmm?” said Rincewind.

  “That!”

  “Oh, that,” said Rincewind. “Just the backwash of a spell. They probably hit the tower in Al Khali.”

  “It must have been pretty big to affect us here.”

  “It probably was.”

  “Hey, that was my palace,” said Creosote weakly. “I mean, I know it was a lot, but it was all I had.”

  “Sorry.”

  “But there were people in the city!”

  “They’re probably all right,” said Rincewind.

  “Good.”

  “Whatever they are.”

  “What?”

  Conina grabbed his arm. “Don’t shout at him,” she said. “He’s not himself.”

  “Ah,” said Creosote dourly, “an improvement.”

  “I say, that’s a bit unfair,” Nijel protested. “I mean, he got me out of the snake pit and, well, he knows a lot—”

  “Yes, wizards are good at getting you out of the sort of trouble that only wizards can get you into,” said Creosote. “Then they expect you to thank them.”

  “Oh, I think—”

  “It’s got to be said,” said Creosote, waving his hands irritably. He was briefly illuminated by the passage of another spell across the tormented sky.

  “Look at that!” he snapped. “Oh, he means well. They all mean well. They probably all think the Disc would be a better place if they were in charge. Take it from me, there’s nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favor. Wizards! When all’s said and done, what good are they? I mean, can you name me something worthwhile any wizard’s done?”

  “I think that’s a bit cruel,” said Conina, but with an edge in her voice that suggested that she could be open to persuasion on the subject.

  “Well, they make me sick,” muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn’t like it much.

  “I think we’ll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,” said Nijel diplomatically. “Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.”

  “My mouth feels all horrible, too,” muttered Creosote, determined to cling onto the remnant of his anger.

  Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.

  “He’s gone!”

  In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.

  He hadn’t wanted much, ever. He’d stuck with wizardry even though he wasn’t any good at it, he’d always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he’d show them. Precisely who ‘they’ were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.

  He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.

  The Luggage was having problems of its own.

  The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another’s clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.

  Here is what it looked like.

  It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.

  Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn’t know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallizing on
its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-colored corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.

  It was hot and stuffy inside the tower. There were no internal floors, just a series of walkways around the walls. They were lined with wizards, and the central space was a column of octarine light that creaked loudly as they poured their power into it. At its base stood Abrim, the octarine gems on the hat blazing so brightly that they looked more like holes cut through into a different universe where, in defiance of probability, they had come out inside a sun.

  The vizier stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes shut, mouth a thin line of concentration, balancing the forces. Usually a wizard could control power only to the extent of his own physical capability, but Abrim was learning fast.

  You made yourself the pinch in the hourglass, the fulcrum on the balance, the roll around the sausage.

  Do it right and you were the power, it was part of you and you were capable of—

  Has it been pointed out that his feet were several inches off the ground? His feet were several inches off the ground.

  Abrim was pulling together the potency for a spell that would soar away into the sky and beset the Ankh tower with a thousand screaming demons when there came a thunderous knock at the door.

  There is a mantra to be said on these occasions. It doesn’t matter if the door is a tent flap, a scrap of hide on a windblown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in it or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of colored glass and a bell-push that plays a choice of twenty popular melodies that no music lover would want to listen to even after five years’ sensory deprivation.

  One wizard turned to another and duly said: “I wonder who that can be at this time of night?”

  There was another series of thumps on the woodwork.

  “There can’t be anyone alive out there,” said the other wizard, and he said it nervously, because if you ruled out the possibility of it being anyone alive that always left the suspicion that perhaps it was someone dead.