In fact there was only one very cautious snake, which remained obstinately curled up in a corner of the shadowy pit watching Rincewind suspiciously, possibly because he reminded it of a mongoose.
'Hi,' it said eventually. 'Are you a wizard?'
As a line of snake dialogue this was a considerable improvement on the normal string of esses, but Rincewind was sufficiently despondent not to waste time wondering and simply replied, 'It's on my hat, can't you read?'
'In seventeen languages, actually. I taught myself.'
'Really?'
'I sent off for courses. But I try not to read, of course. It's not in character.'
'I suppose it wouldn't be.' It was certainly the most cultured snake voice that Rincewind had ever heard.
'It's the same with the voice, I'm afraid,' the snake added. 'I shouldn't really be talking to you now. Not like this, anyway. I suppose I could grunt a bit. I rather think I should be trying to kill you, in fact.'
'I have curious and unusual powers,' said Rincewind. Fair enough, he thought, an almost total inability to master any form of magic is pretty unusual for a wizard and anyway, it doesn't matter about lying to a snake.
'Gosh. Well, I expect you won't be in here long, then.'
'Hmm?'
'I expect you'll be levitating out of here like a shot, any minute.'
Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.
'I might,' he said cautiously.
'In that case, you wouldn't mind taking me with you, would you?'
'Eh?'
'It's a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it's the pits.'
'Take you? But you're a snake, it's your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things.'
A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.
'That's a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone,' it said.
The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.
It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.
To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word 'emaciated'. He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.
Rincewind looked again.
He had been right the first time.
The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes — a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, youd see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you'd never see another one wearing -
The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.
'I can't help it,' he said. 'I promised my mother.'
'Woolly underwear?'
Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city's astronomers, but that wasn't the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn't the strangest thing.
The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.
The occupants watched it for some time, sipping their coffee laced with desert orakh. This drink, made from cacti sap and scorpion venom, is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe, but the desert nomads don't drink it for its intoxicating effects. They use it because they need something to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee.
Not because you could use the coffee to waterproof roofs. Not because it went through the untrained stomach lining like a hot ball bearing through runny butter. What it did was worse.
It made you knurd.[17]
The sons of the desert glanced suspiciously into their thimble-sized coffee-cups, and wondered whether they had overdone the orakh. Were they all seeing the same thing? Would it be foolish to pass a remark? These are the sort of things you need to worry about if you want to retain any credibility as a steely-eyed son of the deep desert. Pointing a shaking finger and saying, 'Hey, look, a box just walked in here on hundreds of little legs, isn't that extraordinary!' would show a terrible and possibly fatal lack of machismo.
The drinkers tried not to catch one another's eye, even when the Luggage slid up to the row of orakh jars against the far wall. The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.
Finally one of them said, 'I think it wants a drink.'
There was a long silence, and then one of the others said, with the precision of a chess Grand Master making a killing move, 'What does?'
The rest of the drinkers gazed impassively into their glasses.
There was no sound for a while other than the plop-plopping of a gecko's footsteps across the sweating ceiling.
The first drinker said, 'The demon that's Just moved up behind you is what I was referring to, O brother of the sands.'
The current holder of the All-Wadi Imperturbability Championship smiled glassily until he felt a tugging on his robe. The smile stayed where it was but the rest of his face didn't seem to want to be associated with it.
The Luggage was feeling crossed in love and was doing what any sensible person would do in these circumstances, which was get drunk. It had no money and no way of asking for what it wanted, but the Luggage somehow never had much difficulty in making itself understood.
The tavern keeper spent a very long lonely night filling a saucer with orakh, before the Luggage rather unsteadily walked out through one of the walls.
The desert was silent. It wasn't normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the hell out of it.
'I promised my mother,' said the boy. 'I get these colds, you see.'
'Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?'
'Oh, I couldn't do that. You've got to wear all this leather stuff.'
'I wouldn't call it all,' said Rincewind. 'There's not enough of it to call it all. Why have you got to wear it?'
'So people know I'm a barbarian hero, of course.'
Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.
'Barbarian hero,' he murmured.
'It's all right, isn't it? All this leather stuff was very expensive.'
'Yes, but, look — what's your name, lad?'
'Nijel-’
'You see, Nijel
'Nijel the Destroyer,' Nijel added.
'You see, Nijel
'— the Destroyer-’
'All right, the Destroyer-’ said Rincewind desperately. '— son of Harebut the Provision Merchant-’
'What?'
'You've got to be the son of someone,' Nijel explained. 'It says it here somewhere-’ He half-turned and fumbled inside a grubby fur bag, eventually bringing out a thin, torn and grubby book.
'There's a bit in here about selecting your name,' he muttered.
'How come you ended up in this pit, then?'
'I was intending to steal from Creosote's treasury, but I had an asthma attack,' said Nijel, still fumbling through the crackling pages.
Rincewind looked down at the snake, which was still trying to keep out of everyone's way. It had a good thing going in the pit, and knew trouble when it saw it. It wasn't about to cause any aggro for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.
'How long have you been a barbarian hero?'
'I'm just getting started. I've always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along.' Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. 'That's all right, isn't it?'
'It's a desperate sort of life, by all accounts,' Rincewind volunteered.
'Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?' Nijel muttered darkly.
Rincewind thought.
'Is lettuce involved?' he said.
'Oh yes,' said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.
Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn't do.
'Do you know any lamp-wick jokes?' he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.
'I don't think so,' said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.
'I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp-wick?'
'This slab moves,' said Nijel. 'Look, it's a sort of door. Give me a hand.'
He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.
'I expect it's some sort of secret passage,' he added. 'Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It's stuck.'
'Don't you want to hear the rest of the joke?' said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.
'I think not right at the moment,' said Nijel. 'I think I would prefer a bit of magical assistance.'
'I'm not very good at it,' said Rincewind. 'Never got the hang of it, see, it's more than just pointing a finger at it and saying "Kazam-" '
There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smashing it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.
After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.
'Yes,' he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. 'Well. Very good. We'll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going.'
He cleared his throat a bit.
'Nnh,' said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm's length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn't got longer arms.
Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.
'It seems to open into some kind of room,' he said.
'Nnh.'
'After you,' said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.
The wizard staggered forward, bumped his head on the rock and didn't appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.
Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. 'Can you feel something?' he said. 'Should the stone be trembling?'
'Nnh.'
Are you all right?'
'Nnh.'
Nijel put his ear to the stones. 'There's a very strange noise,' he said. A sort of humming.' A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.
Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.
Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noises and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.
If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.
A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.
Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and bumped into him standing, surrounded by an octarine corona, in another cave.
Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flashing eyes and floating hair.
He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.
Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.
'I say,' said Nijel, 'are you all right?'
'Nnh,' said Rincewind, and the syllable turned into a large doughnut.
'You don't look all right,' said Nijel with what might be called, in the circumstances, unusual perspicacity.
'Nnh.'
'Why not try getting us out of here?' Nijel added, and wisely flung himself flat on the floor.
Rincewind nodded like a puppet and pointed his loaded digit at the ceiling, which melted like ice under a blowlamp.
Still the rumbling went on, sending its disquieting harmonics dancing through the palace. It is a well-known factoid that there are frequencies that can cause panic, and frequencies that can cause embarrassing incontinence, but the shaking rock was resonating at the frequency that causes reality to melt and run out at the corners.
Nijel regarded the dripping ceiling and cautiously tasted it.
'Lime custard,' he said, and added, 'I suppose there's no chance of stairs, is there?'
More fire burst from Rincewind's ravaged fingers, coalescing into an almost perfect escalator, except that possibly no other moving staircase in the universe was floored with alligator skin.
Nijel grabbed the gently spinning wizard and leapt aboard.
Fortunately they had reached the top before the magic vanished, very suddenly.
Sprouting out of the centre of the palace, shattering rooftops like a mushroom bursting through an ancient pavement, was a white tower taller than any other building in Al Khali.
Huge double doors had opened at its base and out of them, striding along as though they owned the place, were dozens of wizards. Rincewind thought he could recognise a few faces, faces which he'd seen before bumbling vaguely in lecture theatres or peering amiably at the world in the University grounds. They weren't faces built for evil. They didn't have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.
Nijel pulled back behind a handy wall. He found himself looking into Rincewind's worried eyes.
'Hey, that's magic!'
'I know,' said Rincewind, 'It's not right!' Nijel peered up at the sparkling tower.
'But-’
'It feels wrong,' said Rincewind. 'Don't ask me why.'
Half a dozen of the Seriph's guards erupted from an arched doorway and plunged towards the wizards, their headlong rush made all the more sinister by their hastly battle silences. For a moment their swords flashed in the sunlight, and then a couple of the wizards turned, extended their hands and -
Nijel looked away.
'Urgh,' he said.
A few curved swords dropped on to the cobbles.
'I think we should very quietly go away,' said Rincewind.
'But didn't you see what they just turned them into?' 'Dead people,' said Rincewind. 'I know. I don't want to think about it.'
Nijel thought he'd never stop thinking about it, especially around Sam on windy nights. The point about being killed by magic was that it was much more inventive than, say, steel; there were all sorts of interesting new ways to die, and he couldn't put out of his mind the shapes he'd seen, just for an instant, before the wash of octarine fire had mercifully engulfed them.
'I didn't think wizards were like that,' he said, as they hurried down a passageway. 'I thought they were more, well, more silly than sinister. Sort of figures of fun.'
'Laugh that one off, then,' muttered Rincewind.
'But they just killed them, without even-’
'I wish you wouldn't go on about it. I saw it as well.'
Nijel drew back. His eyes narrowed.
'You're a wizard, too,' he said accusingly.
'Not that kind I'm not,' said Rincewind shortly.
'What kind are you, then?'
'The non-killing kind.'
'It was the way they looked at them as if it just didn't matter-’ said Nijel, shaking his head. 'That was the worst bit.'
'Yes.'
Rincewind dropped the single syllable heavily in front of Nijel's train of thought, like a tree trunk. The boy shuddered, but at least he shut up. Rincewind actually began to feel sorry for him, which was very unusual-he normally felt he needed all his pity for himself.
'Is that the first time you've seen someone killed?' he said.
'Yes.'
'Exactly how long have you been a barbarian hero?'
'Er. What year is this?'
Rincewind peered around a corner, but such people as were around and vertical were far too busy panicking to bother about them.
'Out on the road, then?' he said quietly. 'Lost track of time? I know how it is. This is the Year of the Hyena.'
'Oh. In that case, about-’ Nijel's lips moved soundlessly-’about three days. Look', he added quickly, 'how can people kill like that? Without even thinking about it?'
'I don't know,' said Rincewind, in a tone of voice that suggested he was thinking about it.
'I mean, even when the vizier had me thrown in the snake pit, at least he seemed to be taking an interest.'
'That's good. Everyone should have an interest.'
'I mean, he even laughed!'
Ah. A sense of humour, too.'
Rincewind felt that he could see his future with the same crystal clarity that a man falling off a cliff sees the ground, and for much the same reason. So when Nijel said: 'They just pointed their fingers without so much as-’ , Rincewind snapped: 'Just shut up, will you? How do you think I feel about it? I'm a wizard, too!'
'Yes, well, you'll be all right then,' muttered Nijel.
It wasn't a heavy blow, because even in a rage Rincewind still had muscles like tapioca, but it caught the side of Nijel's head and knocked him down more by the weight of surprise than its intrinsic energy.
'Yes, I'm a wizard all right,' Rincewind hissed. 'A wizard who isn't much good at magic! I've managed to survive up till now by not being important enough to die! And when all wizards are hated and feared, exactly how long do you think I'll last?'
'That's ridiculous!'
Rincewind couldn't have been more taken aback if Nijel had struck him.
'What?'
'Idiot! All you have to do is stop wearing that silly robe and get rid of that daft hat and no one will even know you're a wizard!'
Rincewind's mouth opened and shut a few times as he gave a very lifelike impression of a goldfish trying to grasp the concept of tap-dancing.
'Stop wearing the robe?' he said.
'Sure. All those tatty sequins and things, it's a total giveaway,' said Nijel, struggling to his feet.
'Get rid of the hat?'
'You've got to admit that going around with "wizzard" written on it is a bit of a heavy hint.'
Rincewind gave him a worried grin.
'Sorry,' he said, 'I don't quite follow you-’
'Just get rid of them. It's easy enough, isn't it? Just drop them somewhere and then you could be a, a, well, whatever. Something that isn't a wizard.'
There was a pause, broken only by the distant sounds of fighting.
'Er,' said Rincewind, and shook his head. 'You've lost me there ...'
'Good grief, it's perfectly simple to understand!'
'... not sure I quite catch your drift...' murmured Rincewind, his face ghastly with sweat.
'You can just stop being a wizard.'
Rincewind's lips moved soundlessly as he replayed every word, one at a time, then all at once.
'What?' he said, and then he said, 'Oh.'
'Got it? Want to try it one more time?'
Rincewind nodded gloomily.
'I don't think you understand. A wizard isn't what you do, it's what you are. If I wasn't a wizard, I wouldn't be anything.' He took off his hat and twiddled nervously with the loose star on its point, causing a few more cheap sequins to part company.
'I mean, it's got wizard written on my hat,' he said. 'It's very important -'
He stopped and stared at the hat.
'Hat,' he said vaguely, aware of some importunate memory pressing its nose up against the windows of his mind.
'It's a good hat,' said Nijel, who felt that something was expected of him.
'Hat,' said Rincewind again, and then added, 'the hat! We've got to get the hat!'
'You've got the hat,' Nijel pointed out.
'Not this hat, the other hat. And Conina!'
He took a few random steps along a passageway, and then sidled back.
'Where do you suppose they are?' he said.
'Who?'
'There's a magic hat I've got to find. And a girl.'
,Why?,
'It might be rather difficult to explain. I think there might be screaming involved somewhere.'
Nijel didn't have much of a jaw but, such as it was, he stuck it out.
'There's a girl needs rescuing?' he said grimly.
Rincewind hesitated. 'Someone will probably need rescuing,' he admitted. 'It might possibly be her. Or at least in her vicinity.'
'Why didn't you say so? This is more like it, this is what I was expecting. This is what heroism is all about. Let's go!'
There was another crash, and the sound of people yelling.
'Where?' said Rincewind.
Anywhere!'
Heroes usually have an ability to rush madly around crumbling palaces they hardly know, save everyone and get out just before the whole place blows up or sinks into the swamp. In fact Nijel and Rincewind visited the kitchens, assorted throne rooms, the stables (twice) and what seemed to Rincewind like several miles of corridor.
Occasionally groups of black-clad guards would scurry past them, without so much as a second glance.
'This is ridiculous,' said Nijel. 'Why don't we ask someone? Are you all right?'
Rincewind leaned against a pillar decorated with embarrassing sculpture and wheezed.
'You could grab a guard and torture the information out of him,' he said, gulping air. Nijel gave him an odd look.
'Wait here,' he said, and wandered off until he found a servant industriously ransacking a cupboard.
'Excuse me,' he said, 'which way to the harem?'
'Turn left three doors down,' said the man, without looking around.
'Right.'
He wandered back again and told Rincewind.
'Yes, but did you torture him?'
'No.'
'That wasn't very barbaric of you, was it?'
'Well, I'm working up to it,' said Nijel. 'I mean, I didn't say "thank you".'
Thirty seconds later they pushed aside a heavy bead curtain and entered the seraglio of the Seriph of Al Khali.
There were gorgeous songbirds in cages of gold filigree. There were tinkling fountains. There were pots of rare orchids through which humming-birds skimmed like tiny, brilliant jewels. There were about twenty young women wearing enough clothes for, say, about half a dozen, huddled together in a silent crowd.
Rincewind had eyes for none of this. That is not to say that the sight of several dozen square yards of hip and thigh in every shade from pink to midnight black didn't start certain tides flowing deep in the crevasses of his libido, but they were swamped by the considerably bigger flood of panic at the sight of four guards turning towards him with scimitars in their hands and the light of murder in their eyes.
Without hesitation, Rincewind took a step backwards.
'Over to you, friend,' he said.
'Right!'
Nijel drew his sword and held it out in front of him, his arms trembling at the effort.
There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life.
'Erm,’ he said, 'excuse me...'
'It seems a shame,' said a small wizard.
The others didn't speak. It was a shame, and there wasn't a man among them who couldn't hear the hot whine of guilt all down their backbones. But, as so often happens by that strange alchemy of the soul, the guilt made them arrogant and reckless.
'Just shut up, will you?' said the temporary leader. He was called Benado Sconner, but there is something in the air tonight that suggests that it is not worth committing his name to memory. The air is dark and heavy and full of ghosts.
The Unseen University isn't empty, there just aren't any people there.
But of course the six wizards sent to burn down the Library aren't afraid of ghosts, because they're so charged with magic that they practically buzz as they walk, they're wearing robes more splendid than any Archchancellor has worn, their pointy hats are more pointed than any hats have hitherto been, and the reason they're standing so close together is entirely coincidental.
'It's awfully dark in here,' said the smallest of the wizards.
'It's midnight,' said Sconner sharply, 'and the only dangerous things in here are us. Isn't that right, boys?'
There was a chorus of vague murmurs. They were all in awe of Sconner, who was rumoured to do positive-thinking exercises.
'And we're not scared of a few old books, are we, lads?' He glowered at the smallest wizard. 'You're not, are you?' he added sharply.
'Me? Oh. No. Of course not. They're just paper, like he said,' said the wizard quickly.
'Well, then.'
'There's ninety thousand of them, mind,' said another wizard.
'I always heard there was no end to 'em,' said another. 'It's all down to dimensions, I heard, like what we see is only the tip of the whatever, you know, the thing that is mostly underwater-’
'Hippopotamus?'
Alligator?'
'Ocean?'
'Look, just shut up, all of you!' shouted Sconner. He hesitated. The darkness seemed to suck at the sound of his voice. It packed the air like feathers.
He pulled himself together a bit.
'Right then,' he said, and turned towards the forbidding doors of the Library.
He raised his hands, made a few complicated gestures in which his fingers, in some eye-watering way, appeared to pass through each other, and shattered the doors into sawdust.
The waves of silence poured back again, strangling the sound of falling woodchips.
There was no doubt that the doors were smashed. Four forlorn hinges hung trembling from the frame, and a litter of broken benches and shelves lay in the wreckage. Even Sconner was a little surprised.
'There,' he said. 'It's as easy as that. You see? Nothing happened to me. Right?'
There was a shuffling of curly-toed boots. The darkness beyond the doorway was limned with the indistinct, eye-aching glow of thaumaturgic radiation as possibility particles exceeded the speed of reality in a strong magical field.
'Now then,' said Sconner, brightly, 'who would like the honour of setting the fire?'
Ten silent seconds later he said, 'In that case I will do it myself. Honestly, I might as well be talking to the wall.'
He strode through the doorway and hurried across the floor to the little patch of starlight that lanced down from the glass dome high above the centre of the Library (although, of course, there has always been considerable debate about the precise geography of the place; heavy concentrations of magic distort time and space, and it is possible that the Library doesn't even have an edge, never mind a centre).
He stretched out his arms.
'There. See? Absolutely nothing has happened. Now come on in.'
The other wizards did so, with great reluctance and a tendency to duck as they passed through the ravished arch.
'Okay,' said Sconner, with some satisfaction. 'Now, has everyone got their matches as instructed? Magical fire won't work, not on these books, so I want everyone to
'Something moved up there,' said the smallest wizard.
Sconner blinked.
'What?'
'Something moved up by the dome,' said the wizard, adding by way of explanation, 'I saw it.'
Sconner squinted upwards into the bewildering shadows, and decided to exert a bit of authority.
'Nonsense,' he said briskly. He pulled out a bundle of foul-smelling yellow matches, and said, 'Now, I want you all to pile
'I did see it, you know,' said the small wizard, sulkily.
'All right, what did you see?'
'Well, I'm not exactly-’
'You don't know, do you?' snapped Sconner.
'I saw someth-’
'You don't know!' repeated Sconner, 'You're just seeing shadows, just trying to undermine my authority, isn't that it?' Sconner hesitated, and his eyes glazed momentarily. 'I am calm,' he intoned, 'I am totally in control. I will not let '
'It was-’
'Listen, shortarse, you can just jolly well shut up, all right?'
One of the other wizards, who had been staring upwards to conceal his embarrassment, gave a strangled little cough.
'Er, Sconner-’
'And that goes for you too!' Sconner pulled himself to his full, bristling height and flourished the matches.
'As I was saying,' he said, 'I want you to light the matches and -I suppose I'll have to show you how to light matches, for the benefit of shortarse there-and I'm not out of the window, you know. Good grief. Look at me. You take a match-’
He lit a match, the darkness blossomed into a ball of sulphurous white light, and the Librarian dropped on him like the descent of Man.
They all knew the Librarian, in the same definite but diffused way that people know walls and floors and all the other minor but necessary scenery on the stage of life. If they recall him at all, it was as a sort of gentle mobile sigh, sitting under his desk repairing books, or knuckling his way among the shelves in search of secret smokers. Any wizard unwise enough to hazard a clandestine rollup wouldn't know anything about it until a soft leathery hand reached up and removed the offending homemade, but the Librarian never made a fuss, he just looked extremely hurt and sorrowful about the whole sad business and then ate it.
Whereas what was now attempting with considerable effort to unscrew Sconner's head by the ears was a screaming nightmare with its lips curled back to reveal long yellow fangs.
The terrified wizards turned to run and found themselves bumping into bookshelves that had unaccountably blocked the aisles. The smallest wizard yelped and rolled under a table laden with atlases, and lay with his hands over his ears to block out the dreadful sounds as the remaining wizards tried to escape.
Eventually there was nothing but silence, but it was that particularly massive silence created by something moving very stealthily, as it might be, in search of something else. The smallest wizard ate the tip of his hat out of sheer terror.
The silent mover grabbed him by the leg and pulled him gently but firmly out into the open, where he gibbered a bit with his eyes shut and then, when ghastly teeth failed to meet in his throat, ventured a quick glance.
The Librarian picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him reflectively a foot off the ground, just out of reach of a small and elderly wire-haired terrier who was trying to remember how to bite people's ankles.
'Er-! said the wizard, and was then thrown in an almost flat trajectory through the broken doorway, where his fall was broken by the floor.
After a while a shadow next to him said, 'Well, that's it, then. Anyone seen that daft bastard Sconner?'
And a shadow on the other side of him said, 'I think my neck's broken.'
'Who's that?'
'That daft bastard,' said the shadow, nastily.
'Oh. Sorry, Sconner.'
Sconner stood up, his whole body now outlined in magical aura. He was trembling with rage as he raised his hands.
'I'll show that wretched throwback to respect his evolutionary superiors-’ he snarled.
'Get him, lads!'
And Sconner was borne to the flagstones again under the weight of all five wizards.
'Sorry, but-’
'— you know that if you use-’
`— magic near the Library, with all the magic that's in there-’
'— get one thing wrong and it's a critical Mass and then -'
'BANG! Goodnight, world!'
Sconner growled. The wizards sitting on him decided that getting up was not the wisest thing they could do at this point.
Eventually he said, 'Right. You're right. Thank you. It was wrong of me to lose my temper like that. Clouded my judgement. Essential to be dispassionate. You're absolutely right. Thank you. Get off.
They risked it. Sconner stood up.
'That monkey,' he said, 'has eaten its last banana. Fetch-’
'Er. Ape, Sconner,' said the smallest wizard, unable to stop himself. 'It's an ape, you see. Not a monkey...'
He wilted under the stare.
'Who cares? Ape, monkey, what's the difference?' said Sconner. 'What's the difference, Mr Zoologist?'
'I don't know, Sconner,' said the wizard meekly. 'I think it's a class thing.'
'Shut up.'
'Yes, Sconner.'
'You ghastly little man,' said Sconner.
He turned and added, in a voice as level as a sawblade: 'I am perfectly controlled. My mind is as cool as a bald mammoth. My intellect is absolutely in charge. Which one of you sat on my head? No, I must not get angry. I am not angry. I am thinking positively. My faculties are fully engaged — do any of you wish to argue?'
'No, Sconner,' they chorused.
'Then get me a dozen barrels of oil and all the kindling you can find! That ape's gonna fry!'
From high in the Library roof, home of owls and bats and other things, there was a clink of chain and the sound of glass being broken as respectfully as possible.
'They don't look very worried,' said Nijel, slightly affronted.
'How can I put this?' said Rincewind. 'When they come to write the list of Great Battle Cries of the World, "Erm, excuse me" won't be one of them.'
He stepped to one side. 'I'm not with him,' he said earnestly to a grinning guard. 'I just met him, somewhere. In a pit.' He gave a little laugh. 'This sort of thing happens to me all the time,' he said.
The guards stared through him.
'Erm,’ he said.
'Okay,' he said.
He sidled back to Nijel.
'Are you any good with that sword?'
Without taking his eyes off the guards, Nijel fumbled in his pack and handed Rincewind the book.
'I've read the whole of chapter three,' he said. 'It's got illustrations.'
Rincewind turned over the crumpled pages. The book had been used so hard you could have shuffled it, but what was probably once the front cover showed a rather poor woodcut of a muscular man. He had arms like two bags full of footballs, and he was standing kneedeep in languorous women and slaughtered victims with a smug expression on his face.
About him was the legend: Inne Juste 7 Dayes I wille make You a Barbearian Hero! Below it, in a slightly smaller type, was the name: Cohen the Barbarean. Rincewind rather doubted it. He had met Cohen and, while he could read after a fashion, the old boy had never really mastered the pen and still signed his name with an 'X', which he usually spelled wrong. On the other hand, he gravitated rapidly to anything with money in it.
Rincewind looked again at the illustration, and then at Nijel.
'Seven days?'
'Well, I'm a slow reader.'
'Ah,' said Rincewind.
'And I didn't bother with chapter six, because I promised my mother I'd stick with just the looting and pillaging, until I find the right girl.'
'And this book teaches you how to be a hero?'
'Oh, yes. It's very good.' Nijel gave him a worried glance. 'That's all right, isn't it? It cost a lot of money.'
'Hi,' it said eventually. 'Are you a wizard?'
As a line of snake dialogue this was a considerable improvement on the normal string of esses, but Rincewind was sufficiently despondent not to waste time wondering and simply replied, 'It's on my hat, can't you read?'
'In seventeen languages, actually. I taught myself.'
'Really?'
'I sent off for courses. But I try not to read, of course. It's not in character.'
'I suppose it wouldn't be.' It was certainly the most cultured snake voice that Rincewind had ever heard.
'It's the same with the voice, I'm afraid,' the snake added. 'I shouldn't really be talking to you now. Not like this, anyway. I suppose I could grunt a bit. I rather think I should be trying to kill you, in fact.'
'I have curious and unusual powers,' said Rincewind. Fair enough, he thought, an almost total inability to master any form of magic is pretty unusual for a wizard and anyway, it doesn't matter about lying to a snake.
'Gosh. Well, I expect you won't be in here long, then.'
'Hmm?'
'I expect you'll be levitating out of here like a shot, any minute.'
Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.
'I might,' he said cautiously.
'In that case, you wouldn't mind taking me with you, would you?'
'Eh?'
'It's a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it's the pits.'
'Take you? But you're a snake, it's your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things.'
A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.
'That's a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone,' it said.
The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.
It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.
To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word 'emaciated'. He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.
Rincewind looked again.
He had been right the first time.
The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes — a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, youd see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you'd never see another one wearing -
The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.
'I can't help it,' he said. 'I promised my mother.'
'Woolly underwear?'
Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city's astronomers, but that wasn't the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn't the strangest thing.
The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.
The occupants watched it for some time, sipping their coffee laced with desert orakh. This drink, made from cacti sap and scorpion venom, is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe, but the desert nomads don't drink it for its intoxicating effects. They use it because they need something to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee.
Not because you could use the coffee to waterproof roofs. Not because it went through the untrained stomach lining like a hot ball bearing through runny butter. What it did was worse.
It made you knurd.[17]
The sons of the desert glanced suspiciously into their thimble-sized coffee-cups, and wondered whether they had overdone the orakh. Were they all seeing the same thing? Would it be foolish to pass a remark? These are the sort of things you need to worry about if you want to retain any credibility as a steely-eyed son of the deep desert. Pointing a shaking finger and saying, 'Hey, look, a box just walked in here on hundreds of little legs, isn't that extraordinary!' would show a terrible and possibly fatal lack of machismo.
The drinkers tried not to catch one another's eye, even when the Luggage slid up to the row of orakh jars against the far wall. The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.
Finally one of them said, 'I think it wants a drink.'
There was a long silence, and then one of the others said, with the precision of a chess Grand Master making a killing move, 'What does?'
The rest of the drinkers gazed impassively into their glasses.
There was no sound for a while other than the plop-plopping of a gecko's footsteps across the sweating ceiling.
The first drinker said, 'The demon that's Just moved up behind you is what I was referring to, O brother of the sands.'
The current holder of the All-Wadi Imperturbability Championship smiled glassily until he felt a tugging on his robe. The smile stayed where it was but the rest of his face didn't seem to want to be associated with it.
The Luggage was feeling crossed in love and was doing what any sensible person would do in these circumstances, which was get drunk. It had no money and no way of asking for what it wanted, but the Luggage somehow never had much difficulty in making itself understood.
The tavern keeper spent a very long lonely night filling a saucer with orakh, before the Luggage rather unsteadily walked out through one of the walls.
The desert was silent. It wasn't normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the hell out of it.
'I promised my mother,' said the boy. 'I get these colds, you see.'
'Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?'
'Oh, I couldn't do that. You've got to wear all this leather stuff.'
'I wouldn't call it all,' said Rincewind. 'There's not enough of it to call it all. Why have you got to wear it?'
'So people know I'm a barbarian hero, of course.'
Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.
'Barbarian hero,' he murmured.
'It's all right, isn't it? All this leather stuff was very expensive.'
'Yes, but, look — what's your name, lad?'
'Nijel-’
'You see, Nijel
'Nijel the Destroyer,' Nijel added.
'You see, Nijel
'— the Destroyer-’
'All right, the Destroyer-’ said Rincewind desperately. '— son of Harebut the Provision Merchant-’
'What?'
'You've got to be the son of someone,' Nijel explained. 'It says it here somewhere-’ He half-turned and fumbled inside a grubby fur bag, eventually bringing out a thin, torn and grubby book.
'There's a bit in here about selecting your name,' he muttered.
'How come you ended up in this pit, then?'
'I was intending to steal from Creosote's treasury, but I had an asthma attack,' said Nijel, still fumbling through the crackling pages.
Rincewind looked down at the snake, which was still trying to keep out of everyone's way. It had a good thing going in the pit, and knew trouble when it saw it. It wasn't about to cause any aggro for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.
'How long have you been a barbarian hero?'
'I'm just getting started. I've always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along.' Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. 'That's all right, isn't it?'
'It's a desperate sort of life, by all accounts,' Rincewind volunteered.
'Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?' Nijel muttered darkly.
Rincewind thought.
'Is lettuce involved?' he said.
'Oh yes,' said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.
Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn't do.
'Do you know any lamp-wick jokes?' he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.
'I don't think so,' said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.
'I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp-wick?'
'This slab moves,' said Nijel. 'Look, it's a sort of door. Give me a hand.'
He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.
'I expect it's some sort of secret passage,' he added. 'Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It's stuck.'
'Don't you want to hear the rest of the joke?' said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.
'I think not right at the moment,' said Nijel. 'I think I would prefer a bit of magical assistance.'
'I'm not very good at it,' said Rincewind. 'Never got the hang of it, see, it's more than just pointing a finger at it and saying "Kazam-" '
There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smashing it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.
After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.
'Yes,' he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. 'Well. Very good. We'll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going.'
He cleared his throat a bit.
'Nnh,' said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm's length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn't got longer arms.
Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.
'It seems to open into some kind of room,' he said.
'Nnh.'
'After you,' said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.
The wizard staggered forward, bumped his head on the rock and didn't appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.
Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. 'Can you feel something?' he said. 'Should the stone be trembling?'
'Nnh.'
Are you all right?'
'Nnh.'
Nijel put his ear to the stones. 'There's a very strange noise,' he said. A sort of humming.' A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.
Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.
Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noises and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.
If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.
A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.
Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and bumped into him standing, surrounded by an octarine corona, in another cave.
Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flashing eyes and floating hair.
He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.
Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.
'I say,' said Nijel, 'are you all right?'
'Nnh,' said Rincewind, and the syllable turned into a large doughnut.
'You don't look all right,' said Nijel with what might be called, in the circumstances, unusual perspicacity.
'Nnh.'
'Why not try getting us out of here?' Nijel added, and wisely flung himself flat on the floor.
Rincewind nodded like a puppet and pointed his loaded digit at the ceiling, which melted like ice under a blowlamp.
Still the rumbling went on, sending its disquieting harmonics dancing through the palace. It is a well-known factoid that there are frequencies that can cause panic, and frequencies that can cause embarrassing incontinence, but the shaking rock was resonating at the frequency that causes reality to melt and run out at the corners.
Nijel regarded the dripping ceiling and cautiously tasted it.
'Lime custard,' he said, and added, 'I suppose there's no chance of stairs, is there?'
More fire burst from Rincewind's ravaged fingers, coalescing into an almost perfect escalator, except that possibly no other moving staircase in the universe was floored with alligator skin.
Nijel grabbed the gently spinning wizard and leapt aboard.
Fortunately they had reached the top before the magic vanished, very suddenly.
Sprouting out of the centre of the palace, shattering rooftops like a mushroom bursting through an ancient pavement, was a white tower taller than any other building in Al Khali.
Huge double doors had opened at its base and out of them, striding along as though they owned the place, were dozens of wizards. Rincewind thought he could recognise a few faces, faces which he'd seen before bumbling vaguely in lecture theatres or peering amiably at the world in the University grounds. They weren't faces built for evil. They didn't have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.
Nijel pulled back behind a handy wall. He found himself looking into Rincewind's worried eyes.
'Hey, that's magic!'
'I know,' said Rincewind, 'It's not right!' Nijel peered up at the sparkling tower.
'But-’
'It feels wrong,' said Rincewind. 'Don't ask me why.'
Half a dozen of the Seriph's guards erupted from an arched doorway and plunged towards the wizards, their headlong rush made all the more sinister by their hastly battle silences. For a moment their swords flashed in the sunlight, and then a couple of the wizards turned, extended their hands and -
Nijel looked away.
'Urgh,' he said.
A few curved swords dropped on to the cobbles.
'I think we should very quietly go away,' said Rincewind.
'But didn't you see what they just turned them into?' 'Dead people,' said Rincewind. 'I know. I don't want to think about it.'
Nijel thought he'd never stop thinking about it, especially around Sam on windy nights. The point about being killed by magic was that it was much more inventive than, say, steel; there were all sorts of interesting new ways to die, and he couldn't put out of his mind the shapes he'd seen, just for an instant, before the wash of octarine fire had mercifully engulfed them.
'I didn't think wizards were like that,' he said, as they hurried down a passageway. 'I thought they were more, well, more silly than sinister. Sort of figures of fun.'
'Laugh that one off, then,' muttered Rincewind.
'But they just killed them, without even-’
'I wish you wouldn't go on about it. I saw it as well.'
Nijel drew back. His eyes narrowed.
'You're a wizard, too,' he said accusingly.
'Not that kind I'm not,' said Rincewind shortly.
'What kind are you, then?'
'The non-killing kind.'
'It was the way they looked at them as if it just didn't matter-’ said Nijel, shaking his head. 'That was the worst bit.'
'Yes.'
Rincewind dropped the single syllable heavily in front of Nijel's train of thought, like a tree trunk. The boy shuddered, but at least he shut up. Rincewind actually began to feel sorry for him, which was very unusual-he normally felt he needed all his pity for himself.
'Is that the first time you've seen someone killed?' he said.
'Yes.'
'Exactly how long have you been a barbarian hero?'
'Er. What year is this?'
Rincewind peered around a corner, but such people as were around and vertical were far too busy panicking to bother about them.
'Out on the road, then?' he said quietly. 'Lost track of time? I know how it is. This is the Year of the Hyena.'
'Oh. In that case, about-’ Nijel's lips moved soundlessly-’about three days. Look', he added quickly, 'how can people kill like that? Without even thinking about it?'
'I don't know,' said Rincewind, in a tone of voice that suggested he was thinking about it.
'I mean, even when the vizier had me thrown in the snake pit, at least he seemed to be taking an interest.'
'That's good. Everyone should have an interest.'
'I mean, he even laughed!'
Ah. A sense of humour, too.'
Rincewind felt that he could see his future with the same crystal clarity that a man falling off a cliff sees the ground, and for much the same reason. So when Nijel said: 'They just pointed their fingers without so much as-’ , Rincewind snapped: 'Just shut up, will you? How do you think I feel about it? I'm a wizard, too!'
'Yes, well, you'll be all right then,' muttered Nijel.
It wasn't a heavy blow, because even in a rage Rincewind still had muscles like tapioca, but it caught the side of Nijel's head and knocked him down more by the weight of surprise than its intrinsic energy.
'Yes, I'm a wizard all right,' Rincewind hissed. 'A wizard who isn't much good at magic! I've managed to survive up till now by not being important enough to die! And when all wizards are hated and feared, exactly how long do you think I'll last?'
'That's ridiculous!'
Rincewind couldn't have been more taken aback if Nijel had struck him.
'What?'
'Idiot! All you have to do is stop wearing that silly robe and get rid of that daft hat and no one will even know you're a wizard!'
Rincewind's mouth opened and shut a few times as he gave a very lifelike impression of a goldfish trying to grasp the concept of tap-dancing.
'Stop wearing the robe?' he said.
'Sure. All those tatty sequins and things, it's a total giveaway,' said Nijel, struggling to his feet.
'Get rid of the hat?'
'You've got to admit that going around with "wizzard" written on it is a bit of a heavy hint.'
Rincewind gave him a worried grin.
'Sorry,' he said, 'I don't quite follow you-’
'Just get rid of them. It's easy enough, isn't it? Just drop them somewhere and then you could be a, a, well, whatever. Something that isn't a wizard.'
There was a pause, broken only by the distant sounds of fighting.
'Er,' said Rincewind, and shook his head. 'You've lost me there ...'
'Good grief, it's perfectly simple to understand!'
'... not sure I quite catch your drift...' murmured Rincewind, his face ghastly with sweat.
'You can just stop being a wizard.'
Rincewind's lips moved soundlessly as he replayed every word, one at a time, then all at once.
'What?' he said, and then he said, 'Oh.'
'Got it? Want to try it one more time?'
Rincewind nodded gloomily.
'I don't think you understand. A wizard isn't what you do, it's what you are. If I wasn't a wizard, I wouldn't be anything.' He took off his hat and twiddled nervously with the loose star on its point, causing a few more cheap sequins to part company.
'I mean, it's got wizard written on my hat,' he said. 'It's very important -'
He stopped and stared at the hat.
'Hat,' he said vaguely, aware of some importunate memory pressing its nose up against the windows of his mind.
'It's a good hat,' said Nijel, who felt that something was expected of him.
'Hat,' said Rincewind again, and then added, 'the hat! We've got to get the hat!'
'You've got the hat,' Nijel pointed out.
'Not this hat, the other hat. And Conina!'
He took a few random steps along a passageway, and then sidled back.
'Where do you suppose they are?' he said.
'Who?'
'There's a magic hat I've got to find. And a girl.'
,Why?,
'It might be rather difficult to explain. I think there might be screaming involved somewhere.'
Nijel didn't have much of a jaw but, such as it was, he stuck it out.
'There's a girl needs rescuing?' he said grimly.
Rincewind hesitated. 'Someone will probably need rescuing,' he admitted. 'It might possibly be her. Or at least in her vicinity.'
'Why didn't you say so? This is more like it, this is what I was expecting. This is what heroism is all about. Let's go!'
There was another crash, and the sound of people yelling.
'Where?' said Rincewind.
Anywhere!'
Heroes usually have an ability to rush madly around crumbling palaces they hardly know, save everyone and get out just before the whole place blows up or sinks into the swamp. In fact Nijel and Rincewind visited the kitchens, assorted throne rooms, the stables (twice) and what seemed to Rincewind like several miles of corridor.
Occasionally groups of black-clad guards would scurry past them, without so much as a second glance.
'This is ridiculous,' said Nijel. 'Why don't we ask someone? Are you all right?'
Rincewind leaned against a pillar decorated with embarrassing sculpture and wheezed.
'You could grab a guard and torture the information out of him,' he said, gulping air. Nijel gave him an odd look.
'Wait here,' he said, and wandered off until he found a servant industriously ransacking a cupboard.
'Excuse me,' he said, 'which way to the harem?'
'Turn left three doors down,' said the man, without looking around.
'Right.'
He wandered back again and told Rincewind.
'Yes, but did you torture him?'
'No.'
'That wasn't very barbaric of you, was it?'
'Well, I'm working up to it,' said Nijel. 'I mean, I didn't say "thank you".'
Thirty seconds later they pushed aside a heavy bead curtain and entered the seraglio of the Seriph of Al Khali.
There were gorgeous songbirds in cages of gold filigree. There were tinkling fountains. There were pots of rare orchids through which humming-birds skimmed like tiny, brilliant jewels. There were about twenty young women wearing enough clothes for, say, about half a dozen, huddled together in a silent crowd.
Rincewind had eyes for none of this. That is not to say that the sight of several dozen square yards of hip and thigh in every shade from pink to midnight black didn't start certain tides flowing deep in the crevasses of his libido, but they were swamped by the considerably bigger flood of panic at the sight of four guards turning towards him with scimitars in their hands and the light of murder in their eyes.
Without hesitation, Rincewind took a step backwards.
'Over to you, friend,' he said.
'Right!'
Nijel drew his sword and held it out in front of him, his arms trembling at the effort.
There were a few seconds of total silence as everyone waited to see what would happen next. And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life.
'Erm,’ he said, 'excuse me...'
'It seems a shame,' said a small wizard.
The others didn't speak. It was a shame, and there wasn't a man among them who couldn't hear the hot whine of guilt all down their backbones. But, as so often happens by that strange alchemy of the soul, the guilt made them arrogant and reckless.
'Just shut up, will you?' said the temporary leader. He was called Benado Sconner, but there is something in the air tonight that suggests that it is not worth committing his name to memory. The air is dark and heavy and full of ghosts.
The Unseen University isn't empty, there just aren't any people there.
But of course the six wizards sent to burn down the Library aren't afraid of ghosts, because they're so charged with magic that they practically buzz as they walk, they're wearing robes more splendid than any Archchancellor has worn, their pointy hats are more pointed than any hats have hitherto been, and the reason they're standing so close together is entirely coincidental.
'It's awfully dark in here,' said the smallest of the wizards.
'It's midnight,' said Sconner sharply, 'and the only dangerous things in here are us. Isn't that right, boys?'
There was a chorus of vague murmurs. They were all in awe of Sconner, who was rumoured to do positive-thinking exercises.
'And we're not scared of a few old books, are we, lads?' He glowered at the smallest wizard. 'You're not, are you?' he added sharply.
'Me? Oh. No. Of course not. They're just paper, like he said,' said the wizard quickly.
'Well, then.'
'There's ninety thousand of them, mind,' said another wizard.
'I always heard there was no end to 'em,' said another. 'It's all down to dimensions, I heard, like what we see is only the tip of the whatever, you know, the thing that is mostly underwater-’
'Hippopotamus?'
Alligator?'
'Ocean?'
'Look, just shut up, all of you!' shouted Sconner. He hesitated. The darkness seemed to suck at the sound of his voice. It packed the air like feathers.
He pulled himself together a bit.
'Right then,' he said, and turned towards the forbidding doors of the Library.
He raised his hands, made a few complicated gestures in which his fingers, in some eye-watering way, appeared to pass through each other, and shattered the doors into sawdust.
The waves of silence poured back again, strangling the sound of falling woodchips.
There was no doubt that the doors were smashed. Four forlorn hinges hung trembling from the frame, and a litter of broken benches and shelves lay in the wreckage. Even Sconner was a little surprised.
'There,' he said. 'It's as easy as that. You see? Nothing happened to me. Right?'
There was a shuffling of curly-toed boots. The darkness beyond the doorway was limned with the indistinct, eye-aching glow of thaumaturgic radiation as possibility particles exceeded the speed of reality in a strong magical field.
'Now then,' said Sconner, brightly, 'who would like the honour of setting the fire?'
Ten silent seconds later he said, 'In that case I will do it myself. Honestly, I might as well be talking to the wall.'
He strode through the doorway and hurried across the floor to the little patch of starlight that lanced down from the glass dome high above the centre of the Library (although, of course, there has always been considerable debate about the precise geography of the place; heavy concentrations of magic distort time and space, and it is possible that the Library doesn't even have an edge, never mind a centre).
He stretched out his arms.
'There. See? Absolutely nothing has happened. Now come on in.'
The other wizards did so, with great reluctance and a tendency to duck as they passed through the ravished arch.
'Okay,' said Sconner, with some satisfaction. 'Now, has everyone got their matches as instructed? Magical fire won't work, not on these books, so I want everyone to
'Something moved up there,' said the smallest wizard.
Sconner blinked.
'What?'
'Something moved up by the dome,' said the wizard, adding by way of explanation, 'I saw it.'
Sconner squinted upwards into the bewildering shadows, and decided to exert a bit of authority.
'Nonsense,' he said briskly. He pulled out a bundle of foul-smelling yellow matches, and said, 'Now, I want you all to pile
'I did see it, you know,' said the small wizard, sulkily.
'All right, what did you see?'
'Well, I'm not exactly-’
'You don't know, do you?' snapped Sconner.
'I saw someth-’
'You don't know!' repeated Sconner, 'You're just seeing shadows, just trying to undermine my authority, isn't that it?' Sconner hesitated, and his eyes glazed momentarily. 'I am calm,' he intoned, 'I am totally in control. I will not let '
'It was-’
'Listen, shortarse, you can just jolly well shut up, all right?'
One of the other wizards, who had been staring upwards to conceal his embarrassment, gave a strangled little cough.
'Er, Sconner-’
'And that goes for you too!' Sconner pulled himself to his full, bristling height and flourished the matches.
'As I was saying,' he said, 'I want you to light the matches and -I suppose I'll have to show you how to light matches, for the benefit of shortarse there-and I'm not out of the window, you know. Good grief. Look at me. You take a match-’
He lit a match, the darkness blossomed into a ball of sulphurous white light, and the Librarian dropped on him like the descent of Man.
They all knew the Librarian, in the same definite but diffused way that people know walls and floors and all the other minor but necessary scenery on the stage of life. If they recall him at all, it was as a sort of gentle mobile sigh, sitting under his desk repairing books, or knuckling his way among the shelves in search of secret smokers. Any wizard unwise enough to hazard a clandestine rollup wouldn't know anything about it until a soft leathery hand reached up and removed the offending homemade, but the Librarian never made a fuss, he just looked extremely hurt and sorrowful about the whole sad business and then ate it.
Whereas what was now attempting with considerable effort to unscrew Sconner's head by the ears was a screaming nightmare with its lips curled back to reveal long yellow fangs.
The terrified wizards turned to run and found themselves bumping into bookshelves that had unaccountably blocked the aisles. The smallest wizard yelped and rolled under a table laden with atlases, and lay with his hands over his ears to block out the dreadful sounds as the remaining wizards tried to escape.
Eventually there was nothing but silence, but it was that particularly massive silence created by something moving very stealthily, as it might be, in search of something else. The smallest wizard ate the tip of his hat out of sheer terror.
The silent mover grabbed him by the leg and pulled him gently but firmly out into the open, where he gibbered a bit with his eyes shut and then, when ghastly teeth failed to meet in his throat, ventured a quick glance.
The Librarian picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him reflectively a foot off the ground, just out of reach of a small and elderly wire-haired terrier who was trying to remember how to bite people's ankles.
'Er-! said the wizard, and was then thrown in an almost flat trajectory through the broken doorway, where his fall was broken by the floor.
After a while a shadow next to him said, 'Well, that's it, then. Anyone seen that daft bastard Sconner?'
And a shadow on the other side of him said, 'I think my neck's broken.'
'Who's that?'
'That daft bastard,' said the shadow, nastily.
'Oh. Sorry, Sconner.'
Sconner stood up, his whole body now outlined in magical aura. He was trembling with rage as he raised his hands.
'I'll show that wretched throwback to respect his evolutionary superiors-’ he snarled.
'Get him, lads!'
And Sconner was borne to the flagstones again under the weight of all five wizards.
'Sorry, but-’
'— you know that if you use-’
`— magic near the Library, with all the magic that's in there-’
'— get one thing wrong and it's a critical Mass and then -'
'BANG! Goodnight, world!'
Sconner growled. The wizards sitting on him decided that getting up was not the wisest thing they could do at this point.
Eventually he said, 'Right. You're right. Thank you. It was wrong of me to lose my temper like that. Clouded my judgement. Essential to be dispassionate. You're absolutely right. Thank you. Get off.
They risked it. Sconner stood up.
'That monkey,' he said, 'has eaten its last banana. Fetch-’
'Er. Ape, Sconner,' said the smallest wizard, unable to stop himself. 'It's an ape, you see. Not a monkey...'
He wilted under the stare.
'Who cares? Ape, monkey, what's the difference?' said Sconner. 'What's the difference, Mr Zoologist?'
'I don't know, Sconner,' said the wizard meekly. 'I think it's a class thing.'
'Shut up.'
'Yes, Sconner.'
'You ghastly little man,' said Sconner.
He turned and added, in a voice as level as a sawblade: 'I am perfectly controlled. My mind is as cool as a bald mammoth. My intellect is absolutely in charge. Which one of you sat on my head? No, I must not get angry. I am not angry. I am thinking positively. My faculties are fully engaged — do any of you wish to argue?'
'No, Sconner,' they chorused.
'Then get me a dozen barrels of oil and all the kindling you can find! That ape's gonna fry!'
From high in the Library roof, home of owls and bats and other things, there was a clink of chain and the sound of glass being broken as respectfully as possible.
'They don't look very worried,' said Nijel, slightly affronted.
'How can I put this?' said Rincewind. 'When they come to write the list of Great Battle Cries of the World, "Erm, excuse me" won't be one of them.'
He stepped to one side. 'I'm not with him,' he said earnestly to a grinning guard. 'I just met him, somewhere. In a pit.' He gave a little laugh. 'This sort of thing happens to me all the time,' he said.
The guards stared through him.
'Erm,’ he said.
'Okay,' he said.
He sidled back to Nijel.
'Are you any good with that sword?'
Without taking his eyes off the guards, Nijel fumbled in his pack and handed Rincewind the book.
'I've read the whole of chapter three,' he said. 'It's got illustrations.'
Rincewind turned over the crumpled pages. The book had been used so hard you could have shuffled it, but what was probably once the front cover showed a rather poor woodcut of a muscular man. He had arms like two bags full of footballs, and he was standing kneedeep in languorous women and slaughtered victims with a smug expression on his face.
About him was the legend: Inne Juste 7 Dayes I wille make You a Barbearian Hero! Below it, in a slightly smaller type, was the name: Cohen the Barbarean. Rincewind rather doubted it. He had met Cohen and, while he could read after a fashion, the old boy had never really mastered the pen and still signed his name with an 'X', which he usually spelled wrong. On the other hand, he gravitated rapidly to anything with money in it.
Rincewind looked again at the illustration, and then at Nijel.
'Seven days?'
'Well, I'm a slow reader.'
'Ah,' said Rincewind.
'And I didn't bother with chapter six, because I promised my mother I'd stick with just the looting and pillaging, until I find the right girl.'
'And this book teaches you how to be a hero?'
'Oh, yes. It's very good.' Nijel gave him a worried glance. 'That's all right, isn't it? It cost a lot of money.'