Discworld 05 - Sourcery

by Terry Pratchett

  This time the banging rattled the hinges.

  “One of us had better go out,” said the first wizard.

  “Good man.”

  “Ah. Oh. Right.”

  He set off slowly down the short, arched passage.

  “I’ll just go and see who it is, then?” he said.

  “First class.”

  It was a strange figure that made its hesitant way to the door. Ordinary robes weren’t sufficient protection in the high-energy field inside tower, and over his brocade and velvet the wizard wore a thick, padded overall stuffed with rowan shavings and embroidered with industrial-grade sigils. He’d affixed a smoked glass visor to his pointy hat and his gauntlets, which were extremely big, suggested that he was a wicket keeper in a game of cricket played at supersonic speeds. The actinic flashes and pulsations from the great work in the main hall cast harsh shadows around him as he fumbled for the bolts.

  He pulled down the visor and opened the door a fraction.

  “We don’t want any—” he began, and ought to have chosen his words better, because they were his epitaph.

  It was some time before his colleague noticed his continued absence, and wandered down the passage to find him. The door had been thrown wide open, the thaumatic inferno outside roaring against the web of spells that held it in check. In fact the door hadn’t been pushed completely back; he pulled it aside to see why, and gave a little whimper.

  There was a noise behind him. He turned around.

  “Wha—” he began, which is a pretty poor syllable on which to end a life.

  High over the Circle Sea Rincewind was feeling like a bit of an idiot.

  This happens to everyone sooner or later.

  For example, in a tavern someone jogs your elbow and you turn around quickly and give a mouthful of abuse to, you become slowly aware, the belt buckle of a man who, it turns out, was probably hewn rather than born.

  Or a little car runs into the back of yours and you rush out to show a bunch of fives to the driver who, it becomes apparent as he goes on unfolding more body like some horrible conjuring trick, must have been sitting on the back seat.

  Or you might be leading your mutinous colleagues to the captain’s cabin and you hammer on the door and he sticks his great head out with a cutlass in either hand and you say “We’re taking over the ship, you scum, and the lads are right with me!” and he says “What lads?” and you suddenly feel a great emptiness behind you and you say “Um…”

  In other words, it’s the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek.

  Rincewind was still angry and humiliated and so forth, but these emotions had died down a bit and something of his normal character had reasserted itself. It was not very pleased to find itself on a few threads of blue and gold wool high above the phosphorescent waves.

  He’d been heading for Ankh-Morpork. He tried to remember why.

  Of course, it was where it had all started. Perhaps it was the presence of the University, which was so heavy with magic it lay like a cannonball on the incontinence blanket of the Universe, stretching reality very thin. Ankh was where things started, and finished.

  It was also his home, such as it was, and it called to him.

  It has already been indicated that Rincewind appeared to have a certain amount of rodent in his ancestry, and in times of stress he felt an overpowering urge to make a run for his burrow.

  He let the carpet drift for a while on the air currents while dawn, which Creosote would probably have referred to as pink-fingered, made a ring of fire around the edge of the Disc. It spread its lazy light over a world that was subtly different.

  Rincewind blinked. There was a weird light. No, now he came to think about it, not weird but wyrd, which was much weirder. It was like looking at the world through a heat haze, but a haze that had a sort of life of its own. It danced and stretched, and gave more than a hint that it wasn’t just an optical illusion but that it was reality itself that was being tensed and distended, like a rubber balloon trying to contain too much gas.

  The wavering was greatest in the direction of Ankh-Morpork, where flashes and fountains of tortured air indicated that the struggle hadn’t abated. A similar column hung over Al Khali, and then Rincewind realized that it wasn’t the only one.

  Wasn’t that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened onto the great Rim Ocean? And there were others.

  It had all gone critical. Wizardry was breaking up. Goodbye to the University, the levels, the Orders; deep in his heart, every wizard knew that the natural unit of wizardry was one wizard. The towers would multiply and fight until there was one tower left, and then the wizards would fight until there was one wizard.

  By then, he’d probably fight himself.

  The whole edifice that operated as the balance wheel of magic was falling to bits. Rincewind resented that, deeply. He’d never been any good at magic, but that wasn’t the point. He knew where he fitted. It was right at the bottom, but at least he fitted. He could look up and see the whole delicate machine ticking away, gently, browsing off the natural magic generated by the turning of the Disc.

  All he had was nothing, but that was something, and now it had been taken away.

  Rincewind turned the carpet until it was facing the distant gleam that was Ankh-Morpork, which was a brilliant speck in the early morning light, and a part of his mind that wasn’t doing anything else wondered why it was so bright. There also seemed to be a full moon, and even Rincewind, whose grasp of natural philosophy was pretty vague, was sure there had been one of those only the other day.

  Well, it didn’t matter. He’d had enough. He wasn’t going to try to understand anything anymore. He was going home.

  Except that wizards can never go home.

  This is one of the ancient and deeply meaningful sayings about wizards and it says something about most of them that they have never been able to work out what it means. Wizards aren’t allowed to have wives but they are allowed to have parents, and many of them go back to the old home town for Hogswatch Night or Soul Cake Thursday, for a bit of a sing-song and the heart-warming sight of all their boyhood bullies hurriedly avoiding them in the street.

  It’s rather like the other saying they’ve never been able to understand, which is that you can’t cross the same river twice. Experiments with a long-legged wizard and a small river say you can cross the same river thirty, thirty-five times a minute.

  Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like “cl.”

  In this particular case, though, Rincewind couldn’t go home because it actually wasn’t there anymore. There was a city straddling the river Ankh, but it wasn’t one he’d ever seen before; it was white and clean and didn’t smell like a privy full of dead herrings.

  He landed in what had once been the Plaza of Broken Moons, and also in a state of some shock. There were fountains. There had been fountains before, of course, but they had oozed rather than played and they had looked like thin soup. There were milky flagstones underfoot, with little glittery bits in them. And, although the sun was sitting on the horizon like half a breakfast grapefruit, there was hardly anyone around. Normally Ankh was permanently crowded, the actual shade of the sky being a mere background detail.

  Smoke drifted over the city in long greasy coils from the crown of boiling air above the University. It was the only movement, apart from the fountains.

  Rincewind had always been rather proud of the fact that he always felt alone, even in the teeming city, but it was even worse being alone when he was by himself.

  He rolled up the carpet and slung it over one shoulder and padded through the haunted streets toward the University.

  The gates hung open to the wind. Most of the building looked half ruined by misses and ricochets. The tower of sourcery, far too hi
gh to be real, seemed to be unscathed. Not so the old Tower of Art. Half the magic aimed at the tower next door seemed to have rebounded on it. Parts of it had melted and started to run; some parts glowed, some parts had crystalized, a few parts seemed to have twisted partly out of the normal three dimensions. It made you feel sorry even for stone that it should have to undergo such treatment. In fact nearly everything had happened to the tower except actual collapse. It looked so beaten that possibly even gravity had given up on it.

  Rincewind sighed, and padded around the base of the tower toward the Library.

  Towards where the Library had been.

  There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.

  Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.

  Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of a bookcase still smouldered.

  Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backward and forward across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.

  They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.

  Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.

  The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.

  There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas.

  He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for some time until the end fell off.

  Then he ate it.

  “We shouldn’t have let him go like that,” said Conina.

  “How could we have stopped him, oh, beauteous doe-eyed eaglet?”

  “But he may do something stupid!”

  “I should think that is very likely,” said Creosote primly.

  “While we do something clever and sit on a baking beach with nothing to eat or drink, is that it?”

  “You could tell me a story,” said Creosote, trembling slightly.

  “Shut up.”

  The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.

  “I suppose a quick anecdote is out of the question?” he croaked.

  Conina sighed. “There’s more to life than narrative, you know.”

  “Sorry. I lost control a little, there.”

  Now that the sun was well up the crushed-shell beach glowed like a salt flat. The sea didn’t look any better by daylight. It moved like thin oil.

  Away on either side the beach stretched in long, excruciatingly flat curves, supporting nothing but a few clumps of withered dune grass which lived off the moisture in the spray. There was no sign of any shade.

  “The way I see it,” said Conina, “this is a beach, and that means sooner or later we’ll come to a river, so all we have to do is keep walking in one direction.”

  “And yet, delightful snow on the slopes of Mount Eritor, we do not know which one.”

  Nijel sighed, and reached into his bag.

  “Erm,” he said, “excuse me. Would this be any good? I stole it. Sorry.”

  He held out the lamp that had been in the treasury.

  “It’s magic, isn’t it?” he said hopefully. “I’ve heard about them, isn’t it worth a try?”

  Creosote shook his head.

  “But you said your grandfather used it to make his fortune!” said Conina.

  ‘A lamp,” said the Seriph, “he used a lamp. Not this lamp. No, the real lamp was a battered old thing, and one day this wicked pedlar came around offering new lamps for old and my great-grandmother gave it to him for this one. The family kept it in the vault as a sort of memorial to her. A truly stupid woman. It doesn’t work, of course.”

  “You tried it?”

  “No, but he wouldn’t have given it away if it was any good, would he?”

  “Give it a rub,” said Conina. “It can’t do any harm.”

  “I wouldn’t,” warned Creosote.

  Nijel held the lamp gingerly. It had a strangely sleek look, as if someone had set out to make a lamp that could go fast.

  He rubbed it.

  The effects were curiously unimpressive. There was a half-hearted pop and a puff of wispy smoke near Nijel’s feet. A line appeared in the beach several feet away from the smoke. It spread quickly to outline a square of sand, which vanished.

  A figure barrelled out of the beach, jerked to a stop, and groaned.

  It was wearing a turban, an expensive tan, a small gold medallion, shiny shorts and advanced running shoes with curly toes.

  It said, “I want to get this absolutely straight. Where am I?”

  Conina recovered first.

  “It’s a beach,” she said.

  “Yah,” said the genie. “What I mean was, which lamp? What world?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  The creature took the lamp out of Nijel’s unresisting grasp.

  “Oh, this old thing,” he said. “I’m on time share. Two weeks every August but, of course, usually one can never get away.”

  “Got a lot of lamps, have you?” said Nijel.

  “I am somewhat over-committed on lamps,” the genie agreed. “In fact I am thinking of diversifying into rings. Rings are looking big at the moment. There’s a lot of movement in rings. Sorry, people; what can I do you for?” The last phrase was turned in that special voice which people use for humorous self-parody, in the mistaken hope that it will make them sound less like a prat.

  “We—” Conina began.

  “I want a drink,” snapped Creosote. “And you are supposed to say that my wish is your command.”

  “Oh, absolutely no one says that sort of thing anymore,” said the genie, and produced a glass out of nowhere. He treated Creosote to a brilliant smile lasting a small percentage of one second.

  “We want you to take us across the sea to Ankh-Morpork,” said Conina firmly.

  The genie looked blank. Then he pulled a very thick book* from the empty air and consulted it.

  “It sounds a really neat concept,” he said eventually. “Let’s do lunch next Tuesday, okay?”

  “Do what?”

  “I’m a little energetic right now.”

  “You’re a little—?” Conina began.

  “Great,” said the genie, sincerely, and glanced at his wrist. “Hey, is that the time?” He vanished.

  The three of them looked at the lamp in thoughtful silence, and then Nijel said, “Whatever happened to, you know, the fat guys with the baggy trousers and I Hear And Obey O Master?”

  Creosote snarled. He’d just drunk his drink. It had turned out to be water with bubbles in it and a taste like warm flatirons.

  “I’m bloody well not standing for it,” snarled Conina. She snatched the lamp from his hand and rubbed it as if she was sorry she wasn’t holding a handful of emery cloth.

  The genie reappeared at a different spot, which still managed to be several feet away from the weak explosion and obligatory cloud of smoke.

  He was now holding something curved and shiny to his ear, and listening intently. He looked hurriedly at Conina’s angry face and contrived to suggest, by waggling his eyebrows and waving his free hand urgently, that he was currently and inconveniently tied up by irksome matters which, regretfully, prevented him giving her his full attention as of now but, as soon as he had disentangled himself from this importunate person, she could rest assured that her wish, which was certainly a wish of tone and brilliance, would be his command.

  “I shall smash the lamp,” she said quietly.

  The genie flashed her a smile and spoke hastily into the thing he was cradling between his chin and his shoulder.

&n
bsp; “Fine,” he said. “Great. It’s a slice, believe me. Have your people call my people. Stay beyond, okay? Bye.” He lowered the instrument. “Bastard,” he said vaguely.

  “I really shall smash the lamp,” said Conina.

  “Which lamp is this?” said the genie hurriedly.

  “How many have you got?” said Nijel. “I always thought genies had just the one.”

  The genie explained wearily that in fact he had several lamps. There was a small but well-appointed lamp where he lived during the week, another rather unique lamp in the country, a carefully restored peasant rushlight in an unspoilt wine-growing district near Quirm, and just recently a set of derelict lamps in the docks area of Ankh-Morpork that had great potential, once the smart crowd got there, to become the occult equivalent of a suite of offices and a wine bar.

  They listened in awe, like fish who had inadvertently swum into a lecture on how to fly.

  “Who are your people the other people have got to call?” said Nijel, who was impressed, although he didn’t know why or by what.

  “Actually, I don’t have any people yet,” said the genie, and gave a grimace that was definitely upwardly-mobile at the corners. “But I will.”

  “Everyone shut up,” said Conina firmly, “and you, take us to Ankh-Morpork.”

  “I should, if I were you,” said Creosote. “When the young lady’s mouth looks like a letter box, it’s best to do what she says.”

  The genie hesitated.

  “I’m not very deep on transport,” he said.

  “Learn,” said Conina. She was tossing the lamp from hand to hand.

  “Teleportation is a major headache,” said the genie, looking desperate. “Why don’t we do lun—”

  “Right, that’s it,” said Conina. “Now I just need a couple of big flat rocks—”

  “Okay, okay. Just hold hands, will you? I’ll give it my best shot, but this could be one big mistake—”

  The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher* who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.