The Wit And Wisdom Of Discworld

by The Wit

  Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his hearh4 isn’t in the job.

  Eventually Great A ‘Tuin would reach the end of the universe. Eventually the stars would go out. Eventually Nobby might have a bath, although that would probably involve a radical rethinking of the nature of Time.

  *

  ‘Oh, you think you’re so clever, so in-control, so swave, just because I’ve got a sword and you haven’t!’

  *

  The Patrician steepled his hands and looked at Vimes over the top of them.

  ‘Let me give you some advice, Captain,’ he said. ‘It may help you make some sense of the world. I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You’re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides’

  He waved his thin hand towards the city and walked over to the window.

  ‘A great rolling sea of evil. Shallower in some places, of course, but deeper, oh, so much deeper in others. But people like you put together little rafts of rules and vaguely good intentions and say, this is the opposite, this will triumph in the end. Amazing. Down there,’ he said, ‘are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no. I’m sorry if this offends you,’ he added, patting the captain’s shoulder, ‘but you fellows really need us. We’re the only ones who know how to make things work. You see, the only thing the good people are good at is overthrowing the bad people. And you’re good at that, I’ll grant you. But the trouble is that it’s the only thing you’re good at. One day it’s the ringing of the bells and the casting down of the evil tyrant, and the next it’s everyone sitting around complaining that ever since the tyrant was overthrown no one’s been taking out the trash. Because the bad people know how to plan. It’s part of the specification, you might say. Every evil tyrant has a plan to rule the world. The good people don’t seem to have the knack.’

  † And mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh’s crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, on one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words.

  ERIC Discworld’s only demonology backer. Pity he’s not very good at it. All he wants is his three wishes granted. Nothing fancy – to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff.

  But instead of a tractable demon, he calls tip Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard in the Universe, and the extremely in tractable and hostile form of travel accessory known as the Luggage.

  With them on his side, Eric’s in for a ride through space and time that is bound to make him wish (quite fervently) again – this time that he’d never been born.

  Like all beekeepers, Death wore a veil.

  It wasn’t that he had anything to sting, but sometimes a bee would get inside his skull and buzz around and give him a headache.

  No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn’t own their own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

  *

  ‘All right. I give in. We will try the Rite of AshkEnte.’

  The Rite of AshkEnte is the most serious ritual eight wizards can undertake. It summons Death …

  It took place in the mid-night in the University’s Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better. Magic flared, the chants were chanted, the invocations were truly invoked.

  The wizards stared into the magic octogram, which remained empty. After a while the circle of robed figures began to mutter amongst themselves.

  ‘We must have done something wrong.’

  ‘Oook.’

  ‘Maybe He is out.’

  ‘Or busy …’

  ‘Do you think we could give up and go back to bed?’

  WHO ARE WE WAITING FOR, EXACTLY?

  *

  Rincewind wanted to say: Look, what you should do is stop all this messing around with chemicals in dark rooms and have a shave, a haircut, a bath, make that two baths, buy yourself a new wardrobe and get out of an evening and then - but he’d have to be honest, because even washed, shaved and soaked in body splash Thursley wasn’t going to win any prizes - and then you could have your face slapped by any woman of your choice.

  I mean, it wouldn’t be much, but it would be body contact.

  *

  If there is one thing a wizard would trade his grandmother for, it is power. But .. . any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realize that if there was any power in demonology then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.

  *

  Lord Astfgl’s patience, which in any case had the tensile strength of putty, snapped at this point.

  *

  Rincewind tried some. It was a bowl of cereal, nuts, and dried fruit. He didn’t have any quarrel with any of that. It was just that somewhere in the preparation something had apparently done to these innocent ingredients what it takes a million gravities to do to a neutron star. If you died of eating this sort of thing they wouldn’t have to bury you, they would just need to drop you somewhere where the ground was soft.

  *

  Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind’s talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn’t matter if you were fleeing from or to, so long as you were fleeing. It was flight alone that counted. I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I’ll still be.

  But he was also skilled in languages and in practical geography. He could shout ‘help!’ in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve.

  *

  The Tezuman Empire in the jungle valleys of central Klatch is known for its organic market gardens, its exquisite craftsmanship in obsidian, feathers and jade, and its mass human sacrifices in honour of Quezovercoatl, the Feathered Boa, god of mass human sacrifices. As they said, you always knew where you stood with Quezovercoatl. It was generally with a lot of people on top of a great stepped pyramid with someone in an elegant feathered headdress chipping an exquisite obsidian knife for your very own personal use.

  ‘Why do you keep saying wossname?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Limited wossname. Doodah. Thingy. You know. It’s got words in it,’ said the parrot.

  ‘Dictionary?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘It’s their god Quezovercoatl. Half man, half chicken, half jaguar, half serpent, half scorpion and half mad.’

  *

  Rincewind and companions have been tied up and left.

  ‘In fact,’ said da Quirm, ‘I think—’ He rolled from side to side experimentally, tugging at the vines which were holding him down. ‘Yes, I think when they did these ropes up – yes, definitely, they—’

  ‘What? What?’ said Rincewind.

  ‘Yes, definitely’ said da Quirm. ‘I’m absolutely sure about it. They did them up very tightly and professionally. Not an inch of give in them anywhere.’

  *

  They were discussing strategy when Rincewind arrived. The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all mil
itary thinking.

  *

  ‘It’s probably some kind of magic, or something,’ Rincewind said. ‘There’s no air. That’s why there’s no sound. All the little bits of air sort of knock together, like marbles. That’s how you get sound, you know.’

  ‘Is it? Gosh.’

  ‘So we’re surrounded by absolutely nothing,’ said Rincewind. ‘Total nothing.’ He hesitated. ‘There’s a word for it,’ he said. ‘It’s what you get when there’s nothing left and everything’s been used up.’

  ‘Yes. I think it’s called the bill,’ said Eric.

  *

  Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.

  This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many working demons, who had always thought hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on.

  This is because demons, like most people, have failed to distinguish between the body and the soul.

  The fact was that, as droves of demon kings had noticed, there was a limit to what you could do to a soul with, e.g., red-hot tweezers, because even fairly evil and corrupt souls were bright enough to realize that since they didn’t have the concomitant body and nerve endings attached to them there was no real reason, other than force of habit, why they should suffer excruciating agony. So they didn’t. Demons went on doing it anyway, because numb and mindless stupidity is part of what being a demon is all about, but since no one was suffering they didn’t enjoy it much either and the whole thing was pointless. Centuries and centuries of pointlessness.

  *

  Astfgl had achieved in hell a particularly high brand of boredom which is like the boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a nice time.

  *

  The speaker was Duke Vassenego, one of the oldest demons. How old, no one knew. But if he didn’t actually invent original sin, at least he made one of the first copies.

  *

  Rincewind looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.

  The next one was: I Thought You’d Like It.

  Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.

  ‘Weird, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Why do it like this?’

  ‘I think they’re meant to be good intentions,’ said Rincewind. This was a road to hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists.

  Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell tower.

  The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.

  THE alchemists of the Discworld have discovered the magic of the silver screen. But wheat is the dark secret of Holy Wood kill?

  It’s tip to Victor Tugelbend (‘Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can handle a sword a little’) and Theda Withel (‘I come from a little town you’ve probably never heard of) to find out…

  This is space. It’s sometimes called the final frontier.

  (Except that of course you can’t have & final frontier, because there’d be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate …)

  *

  The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist.

  *

  There’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.

  And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

  Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So freshthe pig hasn’t noticed they’re gone!

  Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones - they’d come, they’d served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they’d died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.

  *

  The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor …

  At the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn’t set foot in the University in forty years. A search of the records turned up Ridcully the Brown. He looked ideal …

  A messenger had been sent. Ridcully the Brown had sighed, cursed a bit, found his staff in the kitchen garden where it had been supporting a scarecrow, and had set out.

  Within twelve hours of arriving, Ridcully had installed a pack of hunting dragons in the butlers’ pantry, fired his dreadful crossbow at the ravens on the ancient Tower of Art, drunk a dozen bottles of red wine, and rolled off to bed at two in the morning singing a song with words in it that some of the older and more forgetful wizards had to look up.

  And then he got up at five o’clock to go duck hunting down in the marshes on the estuary.

  And came back complaining that there wasn’t a good trout fishin’ river for miles. (You couldn’t fish in the river Ankh; you had to jump up and down on the hooks even to make them sink.)

  And he ordered beer with his breakfast.

  And told jokes.

  On the other hand, at least he didn’t interfere with the actual running of the University. Ridcully the Brown wasn’t the least interested in running anything except maybe a string of hounds. If you couldn’t shoot arrows at it, hunt it or hook it, he couldn’t see much point in it.

  *

  A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.

  The Alchemists’ Guildhall was new. It was always new.

  It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.

  By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

  *

  The Patrician’s stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.

  *

  ‘Well, what you do is, you take some corn, and you put it in, say, a Number 3 crucible, with some cooking oil, you see, and then you put a plate or something on top of it, and when you heat it up it goes bang, I mean, not seriously bang, and when it’s stopped banging you take the plate off and it’s metamorphosed into these, er, things … If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter … I just call it banged grains.’

  *

  When you became a wizard you were expected to stop shaving and grow a beard like a gorse bush. Very senior wizards looked capable of straining nourishment out of the air via their moustaches, like whales.

  *

  Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

  *

  Most people think in curves and zigzags. For example, they start from a thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what’s for supper, and: I wonder who I know who can lend me five dollars?

  Whereas Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

  Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of p
eople to buy what he had to sell.

  *

  ‘Mr Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before … And a man who could sell Mr Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything.’

  *

  There was a dog sitting by his feet.

  It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically grey but with patches of brown, white and black in outlying areas …

  It looked up slowly, and said ‘Woof?’

  Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn’t that the dog had gone ‘woof!’, although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe never went ‘woof!’, they had complicated barks like ‘whuuugh!’ and ‘hwhoouf!’. No, it was that it hadn’t in fact barked at all. It had said ‘woof.

  ‘Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said “miaow”.’

  He was aware of a strange smell. It was hard to place, but could perhaps have been a very old and slightly damp nursery rug.

  ‘Woof bloody woof,’ said Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

  Dibbler gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. Gaspode could outstare a mirror.

  *

  ‘I never had a chance, you know. I mean, look at the start I had in life. Frone inna river inna sack. An actual sack. Dear little puppy dog opens his eyes, looks out in wonder at the world, style offing, he’s in this sack.’ The tears dripped off his nose. ‘For two weeks I thought the brick was my mother.’ …

  ‘Just my luck they threw me in the Ankh,’ Gaspode went on. ‘Any other river, I’d have drowned and gone to doggy heaven.’

  *

  Victor was aware of a cold sensation against his leg. It was as though a half-melted ice cube was soaking through his trousers. He tried to ignore it, but it had a definite unig-norable quality.

  He looked down.

  ‘ ’scuse me,’ said Gaspode.

  *

  Mrs Marietta Cosmopilite of 3 Quirm Street, Ankh-Morpork, believed the world was round, that a sprig of garlic in her underwear drawer kept away vampires, that it did you good to get out and have a laugh occasionally, that there was niceness in everyone if you only knew where to look, and that three horrible little dwarfs peered in at her undressing every night.†