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 wind-blown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of coloured glass and a bellpush 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.
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 sometime 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 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 realised that it wasn't the only one.
Wasn't that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened on to 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 any more. 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 singsong 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 any more. 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. 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 towards 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 high 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 crystallised, 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 towards 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 backwards and forwards 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 sometime 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 doeeyed 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 round offering new lamps for old and my greatgrandmother 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 any more,' 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[21] 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.
'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 winegrowing 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[22], who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.
And so psychic order was restored. Distance is, however, an entirely subjective phenomenon and creatures of magic can adjust it to suit themselves.
They are not necessarily very good at it.
Rincewind sat dejectedly in the blackened ruins of the Library, trying to put his finger on what was wrong with them.
Well, everything, for a start. It was unthinkable that the Library should be burned. It was the largest accumulation of magic on the Disc. It underpinned wizardry. Every spell ever used was written down in it somewhere. Burning them was, was, was ...
There weren't any ashes. Plenty of wood ashes, lots of chains, lots of blackened stone, lots of mess. But thousands of books don't burn easily. They would leave bits of cover and piles of feathery ash. And there wasn't any.
Rincewind stirred the rubble with his toe.
There was only the one door into the Library. Then there were the cellars — he could see the stairs down to them, choked with garbage — but you couldn't hide all the books down there. You couldn't teleport them out either, they would be resistant to such magic; anyone who tried something like that would end up wearing his brains outside his hat.
There was an explosion overhead. A ring of orange fire formed about halfway up the tower of sourcery, ascended quickly and soared off towards Quirm.
Rincewind slid around on his makeshift seat and stared up at the Tower of Art. He got the distinct impression that it was looking back at him. It was totally without windows, but for a moment he thought he saw a movement up among the crumbling turrets.
He wondered how old the tower really was. Older than the University, certainly. Older than the city, which had formed about it like scree around a mountain. Maybe older than geography. There had been a time when the continents were different, Rincewind understood, and then they'd sort of shuffled more comfortably together like puppies in a basket. Perhaps the tower had been washed up on the waves of rock, from somewhere else. Maybe it had been there before' the Disc itself, but Rincewind didn't like to consider that, because it raised uncomfortable questions about who built it and what for.
He examined his conscience.
It said: I'm out of options. Please yourself.
Rincewind stood up and brushed the dust and ash off his robe, removing quite a lot of the moulting red plush as well. He removed his hat, made a preoccupied attempt at straightening the point, and replaced it on his head.
Then he walked unsteadily towards the Tower of Art.
There was a very old and quite small door at the base. He wasn't at all surprised when it opened as he approached.
'Strange place,' said Nijel. 'Funny curve to the walls.'
'Where are we?' said Conina.
'And is there any alcohol?' said Creosote. 'Probably not,' he added.
'And why is it rocking?' said Conina. 'I've never been anywhere with metal walls before.' She sniffed. 'Can you smell oil?' she added, suspiciously.
The genie reappeared, although this time without the smoke and erratic trapdoor effects. It was noticeable that he tried to keep as far away from Conina as politely possible.
'Everyone okay?' he said.
'Is this Ankh?' she said. 'Only when we wanted to go there, we rather hoped you’d put us somewhere with a door.'
'You're on your way,' said the genie.
'In what?'
Something about the way in which the spirit hesitated caused Nijel's mind to leap a tall conclusion from a standing start. He looked down at the lamp in his hands.
He gave it an experimental jerk. The floor shook.
'Oh, no,' he said. 'It's physically impossible.'
'We're in the lamp?' said Conina.
The room trembled again as Nijel tried to look down the spout.
'Don't worry about it,' said the genie. 'In fact, don't think about it if possible.'
He explained — although 'explained' is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length — that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it,
because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.
'In the circumstances it is best not to think about it, yuh?' said the genie.
'Like not thinking about pink rhinoceroses,' said Nijel, and gave an embarrassed laugh as they stared at him.
'It was a sort of game we had,' he said. 'You had to avoid thinking of pink rhinoceroses.' He coughed. 'I didn't say it was a particularly good game.'
He squinted down the spout again.
'No,' said Conina, 'not very.'
'Uh,' said the genie, 'Would anyone like coffee? Some sounds? A quick game of Significant Quest?'[23]
'Drink?' said Creosote.
'White wine?'
'Foul muck.'
The genie looked shocked.
'Red is bad for -’ it began.
'— but any port in a storm,' said Creosote hurriedly. 'Or sauterne, even. But no umbrella in it.' It dawned on the Seriph that this wasn't the way to talk to the genie. He pulled himself together a bit. 'No umbrella, by the Five Moons of Nasreem. Or bits of fruit salad or olives or curly straws or ornamental monkeys, I command thee by the Seventeen Siderites of Sarudin '
'I'm not an umbrella person,' said the genie sulkily.
'It's pretty sparse in here,' said Conina, 'Why don't you furnish it?'
'What I don't understand,' said Nijel, 'is, if we're all in the lamp I'm holding, then the me in the lamp is holding a smaller lamp and in that lamp-’
The genie waved his hands urgently.
'Don't talk about it!' he commanded. 'Please!'
Nijel's honest brow wrinkled. 'Yes, but,' he said, 'is there a lot of me, or what?'
'It's all cyclic, but stop drawing attention to it, yuh? ... Oh, shit.'
There was the subtle, unpleasant sound of the universe suddenly catching on.
It was dark in the tower, a solid core of antique darkness that had been there since the dawn of time and resented the intrusion of the upstart daylight that nipped in around Rincewind.
He felt the air move as the door shut behind him and the dark poured back, filling up the space where the light had been so neatly that you couldn't have seen the join even if the light had still been there.
The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.
It took a great deal of courage to stand there in that dark. Rincewind didn't have that much, but stood there anyway.
Something started to snuffle around his feet, and Rincewind stood very still. The only reason he didn't move was for fear of treading on something worse.
Then a hand like an old leather glove touched his, very gently, and a voice said: 'Oook.'
Rincewind looked up.
The dark yielded, just once, to a vivid flash of light. And Rincewind saw.
The whole tower was lined with books. They were squeezed on every step of the rotting spiral staircase that wound up inside. They were piled up on the floor, although something about the way in which they were piled suggested that the word 'huddled' would be more appropriate. They had lodged -all right, they had perched — on every crumbling ledge.
They were observing him, in some covert way that had nothing to do with the normal six senses. Books are pretty good at conveying meaning, not necessarily their own personal meanings of course, and Rincewind grasped the fact that they were trying to tell him something.
There was another flash. He realised that it was magic from the sourcerer's tower, reflected down from the distant hole that led on to the roof.
At least it enabled him to identify Wuffles, who was wheezing at his right foot. That was a bit of a relief. Now if he could just put a name to the soft, repetitive slithering noise near his left ear ...
There was a further obliging flash, which found him looking directly into the little yellow eyes of the Patrician, who was clawing patiently at the side of his glass jar. It was a gentle, mindless scrabbling, as if the little lizard wasn't particularly trying to get out but was just vaguely interested in seeing how long it would take to wear the glass away.
Rincewind looked down at the pear-shaped bulk of the Librarian.
'There's thousands of them,' he whispered, his voice being sucked away and silenced by the massed ranks of books. 'How did you get them all in here?'
'Oook oook.'
'They what?'
'Oook,’ repeated the Librarian, making vigorous flapping motions with his bald elbows.
'Fly?'
'Oook.'
'Can they do that?'
'Oook,’ nodded the Librarian.
'That must have been pretty impressive. I'd like to see that one day.'
'Oook.'
Not every book had made it. Most of the important grimoires had got out but a seven-volume herbal had lost its index to the flames and many a trilogy was mourning for its lost volume. Quite a few books had scorch marks on their bindings; some had lost their covers, and trailed their stitching unpleasantly on the floor.
A match flared, and pages rippled uneasily around the walls. But it was only the Librarian, who lit a candle and shambled across the floor at the base of a menacing shadow big enough to climb skyscrapers. He had set up a rough table against one wall and it was covered with arcane tools, pots of rare adhesives and a bookbinder's vice which was already holding a stricken folio. A few weak lines of magic fire crawled across it.
The ape pushed the candlestick into Rincewind's hand, picked up a scalpel and a pair of tweezers, and bent low over the trembling book. Rincewind went pale.
'Um,' he said, 'er, do you mind if I go away? I faint at the sight of glue.'
The Librarian shook his head and jerked a preoccupied thumb towards a tray of tools.
'Oook,' he commanded. Rincewind nodded miserably, and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.
'What are you doing to it?' he managed.
'Oook.'
'An appendectomy? Oh.'
The ape jerked his thumb again, without looking up. Rincewind fished a needle and thread out of the ranks on the tray and handed them over. There was silence broken only by the scritching sound of thread being pulled through paper until the Librarian straightened up and said:
'Oook.'
Rincewind pulled out his handkerchief and mopped the ape's brow.
'Oook.'
'Don't mention it. Is it — going to be all right?'
The Librarian nodded. There was also a general,
almost inaudible sigh of relief from the tier of books above them.
Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vice.
'All right,' he mumbled, 'but what can I do about it?'
'Oook.' The Librarian gave Rincewind a look that would have been exactly like a quizzical look over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles, if he had been wearing any, and reached for another broken book.
'I mean, you know I'm no good at magic.'
'Oook.'
'The sourcery that's about now, it's terrible stuff. I mean, it's the original stuff, from right back in the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.'
'Oook.'
'It'll destroy everything eventually, won't it?'
'Oook.'
'It's about time someone put a stop to this sourcery, right?'
'Oook.'
'Only it can't be me, you see. When I came here I thought I could do something, but that tower! It's so big! It must be proof against all magic! If really powerful wizards won't do anything about it, how can I?'
'Oook,’ agreed the Librarian, sewing a ruptured spine.
'So, you see, I think someone else can save the world this time. I'm no good at it.'
The ape nodded, reached across and lifted Rincewind's hat from his head.
'Hey!'
The Librarian ignored him, picked up a pair of shears.
'Look, that's my hat, if you don't mind don't you dare do that to my-’
He leapt across the floor and was rewarded with a thump across the side of the head, which would have astonished him if he'd had time to think about it; the Librarian might shuffle around the place like a good-natured wobbly balloon, but underneath that oversized skin was a framework of superbly-cantilevered bone and muscle that could drive a fistful of calloused knuckles through a thick oak plank. Running into the Librarian's arm was like hitting a hairy iron bar.
Wuffles started to bounce up and down, yelping with excitement.
Rincewind screamed a hoarse, untranslatable yell of fury, bounced off the wall, snatched up a fallen rock as a crude club, kicked forward and stopped dead.
The Librarian was crouched in the centre of the floor with the shears touching-but not yet cutting-the hat.
And he was grinning at Rincewind.
They stood like a frozen tableau for some seconds. Then the ape dropped the shears, flicked several imaginary flecks of dust off the hat, straightened the point, and placed it on Rincewind's head.
A few shocked moments after this Rincewind realised that he was holding up, at arm's length, a very large and extremely heavy rock. He managed to force it away on one side before it recovered from the shock and remembered to fall on him.
'I see,' he said, sinking back against the wall and rubbing his elbows. And all that's supposed to tell me something, is it? A moral lesson, let Rincewind confront his true self, let him work out what he's really prepared to fight for. Eh? Well, it was a very cheap trick. And I've news for you. If you think it worked-’ he snatched the hat brim — 'if you think it worked. If you think I've. You've got another thought. Listen, it's. If you think.'
His voice stuttered into silence. Then he shrugged.
'All right. But when you get down to it, what can I actually do?'
The Librarian replied with an expansive gesture that indicated, as clearly as if he had said 'oook', that Rincewind was a wizard with a hat, a library of magical books and a tower. This could be regarded as everything a magical practitioner could need. An ape, a small terrier with halitosis and a lizard in a jar were optional extras.
Rincewind felt a slight pressure on his foot. Wuffles, who was extremely slow on the uptake, had fastened his toothless gums on the toe of Rincewind's boot and was giving it a vicious suck.
He picked the little dog up by the scruff of its neck and the bristly stub that, for the want of a better word, it called its tail, and gently lifted it sideways.
'Okay,' he said. 'You'd better tell me what's been happening here.'
From the Carrack Mountains, overlooking the vast cold Sto Plain in the middle of which Ankh-Morpork sprawled like a bag of dropped groceries, the view was particularly impressive. Mishits and ricochets from the magical battle were expanding outwards and upwards, in a bowl-shaped cloud of curdled air at the heart of which strange lights flashed and sparkled.
The roads leading away from it were packed with refugees, and every inn and wayside tavern was crowded out. Or nearly every one.
No-one seemed to want to stop at the rather pleasant little pub nestling among trees just off the road to Quirm. It wasn't that they were frightened to go inside, it was just that, for the moment, they weren't being allowed to notice it.
There was a disturbance in the air about half a mile away and three figures dropped out of nowhere into a thicket of lavender.
They lay supine in the sunshine among the broken, fragrant branches, until their sanity came back. Then Creosote said, 'Where are we, do you suppose?'
'It smells like someone's underwear drawer,' said Conina.
'Not mine,' said Nijel, firmly.
He eased himself up gently and added, 'Has anyone seen the lamp?'
'Forget it. It's probably been sold to build a wine-bar,' said Conina.
Nijel scrabbled around among the lavender stems until his hands found something small and metallic.
'Got it!' he declared.
'Don't rub it!' said the other two, in harmony. They were too late anyway, but that didn't much matter, because all that happened when Nijel gave it a cautious buff was the appearance of some small smoking red letters in mid-air.
' 'Hi",' Nijel read aloud. ' "Do not put down the lamp, because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity." ' He added, 'You know, I think he's a bit over-committed.'
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 wind-blown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of coloured glass and a bellpush 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.
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 sometime 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 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 realised that it wasn't the only one.
Wasn't that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened on to 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 any more. 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 singsong 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 any more. 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. 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 towards 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 high 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 crystallised, 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 towards 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 backwards and forwards 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 sometime 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 doeeyed 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 round offering new lamps for old and my greatgrandmother 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 any more,' 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[21] 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.
'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 winegrowing 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[22], who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.
And so psychic order was restored. Distance is, however, an entirely subjective phenomenon and creatures of magic can adjust it to suit themselves.
They are not necessarily very good at it.
Rincewind sat dejectedly in the blackened ruins of the Library, trying to put his finger on what was wrong with them.
Well, everything, for a start. It was unthinkable that the Library should be burned. It was the largest accumulation of magic on the Disc. It underpinned wizardry. Every spell ever used was written down in it somewhere. Burning them was, was, was ...
There weren't any ashes. Plenty of wood ashes, lots of chains, lots of blackened stone, lots of mess. But thousands of books don't burn easily. They would leave bits of cover and piles of feathery ash. And there wasn't any.
Rincewind stirred the rubble with his toe.
There was only the one door into the Library. Then there were the cellars — he could see the stairs down to them, choked with garbage — but you couldn't hide all the books down there. You couldn't teleport them out either, they would be resistant to such magic; anyone who tried something like that would end up wearing his brains outside his hat.
There was an explosion overhead. A ring of orange fire formed about halfway up the tower of sourcery, ascended quickly and soared off towards Quirm.
Rincewind slid around on his makeshift seat and stared up at the Tower of Art. He got the distinct impression that it was looking back at him. It was totally without windows, but for a moment he thought he saw a movement up among the crumbling turrets.
He wondered how old the tower really was. Older than the University, certainly. Older than the city, which had formed about it like scree around a mountain. Maybe older than geography. There had been a time when the continents were different, Rincewind understood, and then they'd sort of shuffled more comfortably together like puppies in a basket. Perhaps the tower had been washed up on the waves of rock, from somewhere else. Maybe it had been there before' the Disc itself, but Rincewind didn't like to consider that, because it raised uncomfortable questions about who built it and what for.
He examined his conscience.
It said: I'm out of options. Please yourself.
Rincewind stood up and brushed the dust and ash off his robe, removing quite a lot of the moulting red plush as well. He removed his hat, made a preoccupied attempt at straightening the point, and replaced it on his head.
Then he walked unsteadily towards the Tower of Art.
There was a very old and quite small door at the base. He wasn't at all surprised when it opened as he approached.
'Strange place,' said Nijel. 'Funny curve to the walls.'
'Where are we?' said Conina.
'And is there any alcohol?' said Creosote. 'Probably not,' he added.
'And why is it rocking?' said Conina. 'I've never been anywhere with metal walls before.' She sniffed. 'Can you smell oil?' she added, suspiciously.
The genie reappeared, although this time without the smoke and erratic trapdoor effects. It was noticeable that he tried to keep as far away from Conina as politely possible.
'Everyone okay?' he said.
'Is this Ankh?' she said. 'Only when we wanted to go there, we rather hoped you’d put us somewhere with a door.'
'You're on your way,' said the genie.
'In what?'
Something about the way in which the spirit hesitated caused Nijel's mind to leap a tall conclusion from a standing start. He looked down at the lamp in his hands.
He gave it an experimental jerk. The floor shook.
'Oh, no,' he said. 'It's physically impossible.'
'We're in the lamp?' said Conina.
The room trembled again as Nijel tried to look down the spout.
'Don't worry about it,' said the genie. 'In fact, don't think about it if possible.'
He explained — although 'explained' is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length — that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it,
because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.
'In the circumstances it is best not to think about it, yuh?' said the genie.
'Like not thinking about pink rhinoceroses,' said Nijel, and gave an embarrassed laugh as they stared at him.
'It was a sort of game we had,' he said. 'You had to avoid thinking of pink rhinoceroses.' He coughed. 'I didn't say it was a particularly good game.'
He squinted down the spout again.
'No,' said Conina, 'not very.'
'Uh,' said the genie, 'Would anyone like coffee? Some sounds? A quick game of Significant Quest?'[23]
'Drink?' said Creosote.
'White wine?'
'Foul muck.'
The genie looked shocked.
'Red is bad for -’ it began.
'— but any port in a storm,' said Creosote hurriedly. 'Or sauterne, even. But no umbrella in it.' It dawned on the Seriph that this wasn't the way to talk to the genie. He pulled himself together a bit. 'No umbrella, by the Five Moons of Nasreem. Or bits of fruit salad or olives or curly straws or ornamental monkeys, I command thee by the Seventeen Siderites of Sarudin '
'I'm not an umbrella person,' said the genie sulkily.
'It's pretty sparse in here,' said Conina, 'Why don't you furnish it?'
'What I don't understand,' said Nijel, 'is, if we're all in the lamp I'm holding, then the me in the lamp is holding a smaller lamp and in that lamp-’
The genie waved his hands urgently.
'Don't talk about it!' he commanded. 'Please!'
Nijel's honest brow wrinkled. 'Yes, but,' he said, 'is there a lot of me, or what?'
'It's all cyclic, but stop drawing attention to it, yuh? ... Oh, shit.'
There was the subtle, unpleasant sound of the universe suddenly catching on.
It was dark in the tower, a solid core of antique darkness that had been there since the dawn of time and resented the intrusion of the upstart daylight that nipped in around Rincewind.
He felt the air move as the door shut behind him and the dark poured back, filling up the space where the light had been so neatly that you couldn't have seen the join even if the light had still been there.
The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.
It took a great deal of courage to stand there in that dark. Rincewind didn't have that much, but stood there anyway.
Something started to snuffle around his feet, and Rincewind stood very still. The only reason he didn't move was for fear of treading on something worse.
Then a hand like an old leather glove touched his, very gently, and a voice said: 'Oook.'
Rincewind looked up.
The dark yielded, just once, to a vivid flash of light. And Rincewind saw.
The whole tower was lined with books. They were squeezed on every step of the rotting spiral staircase that wound up inside. They were piled up on the floor, although something about the way in which they were piled suggested that the word 'huddled' would be more appropriate. They had lodged -all right, they had perched — on every crumbling ledge.
They were observing him, in some covert way that had nothing to do with the normal six senses. Books are pretty good at conveying meaning, not necessarily their own personal meanings of course, and Rincewind grasped the fact that they were trying to tell him something.
There was another flash. He realised that it was magic from the sourcerer's tower, reflected down from the distant hole that led on to the roof.
At least it enabled him to identify Wuffles, who was wheezing at his right foot. That was a bit of a relief. Now if he could just put a name to the soft, repetitive slithering noise near his left ear ...
There was a further obliging flash, which found him looking directly into the little yellow eyes of the Patrician, who was clawing patiently at the side of his glass jar. It was a gentle, mindless scrabbling, as if the little lizard wasn't particularly trying to get out but was just vaguely interested in seeing how long it would take to wear the glass away.
Rincewind looked down at the pear-shaped bulk of the Librarian.
'There's thousands of them,' he whispered, his voice being sucked away and silenced by the massed ranks of books. 'How did you get them all in here?'
'Oook oook.'
'They what?'
'Oook,’ repeated the Librarian, making vigorous flapping motions with his bald elbows.
'Fly?'
'Oook.'
'Can they do that?'
'Oook,’ nodded the Librarian.
'That must have been pretty impressive. I'd like to see that one day.'
'Oook.'
Not every book had made it. Most of the important grimoires had got out but a seven-volume herbal had lost its index to the flames and many a trilogy was mourning for its lost volume. Quite a few books had scorch marks on their bindings; some had lost their covers, and trailed their stitching unpleasantly on the floor.
A match flared, and pages rippled uneasily around the walls. But it was only the Librarian, who lit a candle and shambled across the floor at the base of a menacing shadow big enough to climb skyscrapers. He had set up a rough table against one wall and it was covered with arcane tools, pots of rare adhesives and a bookbinder's vice which was already holding a stricken folio. A few weak lines of magic fire crawled across it.
The ape pushed the candlestick into Rincewind's hand, picked up a scalpel and a pair of tweezers, and bent low over the trembling book. Rincewind went pale.
'Um,' he said, 'er, do you mind if I go away? I faint at the sight of glue.'
The Librarian shook his head and jerked a preoccupied thumb towards a tray of tools.
'Oook,' he commanded. Rincewind nodded miserably, and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.
'What are you doing to it?' he managed.
'Oook.'
'An appendectomy? Oh.'
The ape jerked his thumb again, without looking up. Rincewind fished a needle and thread out of the ranks on the tray and handed them over. There was silence broken only by the scritching sound of thread being pulled through paper until the Librarian straightened up and said:
'Oook.'
Rincewind pulled out his handkerchief and mopped the ape's brow.
'Oook.'
'Don't mention it. Is it — going to be all right?'
The Librarian nodded. There was also a general,
almost inaudible sigh of relief from the tier of books above them.
Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vice.
'All right,' he mumbled, 'but what can I do about it?'
'Oook.' The Librarian gave Rincewind a look that would have been exactly like a quizzical look over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles, if he had been wearing any, and reached for another broken book.
'I mean, you know I'm no good at magic.'
'Oook.'
'The sourcery that's about now, it's terrible stuff. I mean, it's the original stuff, from right back in the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.'
'Oook.'
'It'll destroy everything eventually, won't it?'
'Oook.'
'It's about time someone put a stop to this sourcery, right?'
'Oook.'
'Only it can't be me, you see. When I came here I thought I could do something, but that tower! It's so big! It must be proof against all magic! If really powerful wizards won't do anything about it, how can I?'
'Oook,’ agreed the Librarian, sewing a ruptured spine.
'So, you see, I think someone else can save the world this time. I'm no good at it.'
The ape nodded, reached across and lifted Rincewind's hat from his head.
'Hey!'
The Librarian ignored him, picked up a pair of shears.
'Look, that's my hat, if you don't mind don't you dare do that to my-’
He leapt across the floor and was rewarded with a thump across the side of the head, which would have astonished him if he'd had time to think about it; the Librarian might shuffle around the place like a good-natured wobbly balloon, but underneath that oversized skin was a framework of superbly-cantilevered bone and muscle that could drive a fistful of calloused knuckles through a thick oak plank. Running into the Librarian's arm was like hitting a hairy iron bar.
Wuffles started to bounce up and down, yelping with excitement.
Rincewind screamed a hoarse, untranslatable yell of fury, bounced off the wall, snatched up a fallen rock as a crude club, kicked forward and stopped dead.
The Librarian was crouched in the centre of the floor with the shears touching-but not yet cutting-the hat.
And he was grinning at Rincewind.
They stood like a frozen tableau for some seconds. Then the ape dropped the shears, flicked several imaginary flecks of dust off the hat, straightened the point, and placed it on Rincewind's head.
A few shocked moments after this Rincewind realised that he was holding up, at arm's length, a very large and extremely heavy rock. He managed to force it away on one side before it recovered from the shock and remembered to fall on him.
'I see,' he said, sinking back against the wall and rubbing his elbows. And all that's supposed to tell me something, is it? A moral lesson, let Rincewind confront his true self, let him work out what he's really prepared to fight for. Eh? Well, it was a very cheap trick. And I've news for you. If you think it worked-’ he snatched the hat brim — 'if you think it worked. If you think I've. You've got another thought. Listen, it's. If you think.'
His voice stuttered into silence. Then he shrugged.
'All right. But when you get down to it, what can I actually do?'
The Librarian replied with an expansive gesture that indicated, as clearly as if he had said 'oook', that Rincewind was a wizard with a hat, a library of magical books and a tower. This could be regarded as everything a magical practitioner could need. An ape, a small terrier with halitosis and a lizard in a jar were optional extras.
Rincewind felt a slight pressure on his foot. Wuffles, who was extremely slow on the uptake, had fastened his toothless gums on the toe of Rincewind's boot and was giving it a vicious suck.
He picked the little dog up by the scruff of its neck and the bristly stub that, for the want of a better word, it called its tail, and gently lifted it sideways.
'Okay,' he said. 'You'd better tell me what's been happening here.'
From the Carrack Mountains, overlooking the vast cold Sto Plain in the middle of which Ankh-Morpork sprawled like a bag of dropped groceries, the view was particularly impressive. Mishits and ricochets from the magical battle were expanding outwards and upwards, in a bowl-shaped cloud of curdled air at the heart of which strange lights flashed and sparkled.
The roads leading away from it were packed with refugees, and every inn and wayside tavern was crowded out. Or nearly every one.
No-one seemed to want to stop at the rather pleasant little pub nestling among trees just off the road to Quirm. It wasn't that they were frightened to go inside, it was just that, for the moment, they weren't being allowed to notice it.
There was a disturbance in the air about half a mile away and three figures dropped out of nowhere into a thicket of lavender.
They lay supine in the sunshine among the broken, fragrant branches, until their sanity came back. Then Creosote said, 'Where are we, do you suppose?'
'It smells like someone's underwear drawer,' said Conina.
'Not mine,' said Nijel, firmly.
He eased himself up gently and added, 'Has anyone seen the lamp?'
'Forget it. It's probably been sold to build a wine-bar,' said Conina.
Nijel scrabbled around among the lavender stems until his hands found something small and metallic.
'Got it!' he declared.
'Don't rub it!' said the other two, in harmony. They were too late anyway, but that didn't much matter, because all that happened when Nijel gave it a cautious buff was the appearance of some small smoking red letters in mid-air.
' 'Hi",' Nijel read aloud. ' "Do not put down the lamp, because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity." ' He added, 'You know, I think he's a bit over-committed.'