'It belonged to my grandfather-’
'A real magic carpet?' said Nijel.
'Listen,' said Rincewind urgently. 'I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.'
'Oh, quite,' the Seriph burped gently, 'genuine. Very pretty pattern.' He squinted at the bottle again, and sighed. 'It was a lovely blue colour,' he added.
'And you wouldn't happen to know where it is?' said Conina slowly, in the manner of one creeping up very carefully to a wild animal that might take fright at any moment.
'In the treasury. I know the way there. I'm extremely rich, you know. Or so they tell me.' He lowered his voice and tried to wink at Conina, eventually managing it with both eyes. 'We could sit on it,' he said, breaking into a sweat. 'And you could tell me a story...'
Rincewind tried to scream through gritted teeth.
His ankles were already beginning to sweat.
'I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet!' he hissed. 'I'm afraid of grounds!'
'You mean heights,' said Conina. And stop being silly.'
'I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!'
The battle of Al Khali was a hammer-headed cloud, in whose roiling depths weird shapes could be heard and strange sounds were seen. Occasional misses seared across the city. Where they landed things were ... different.
For example, a large part of the soak had turned into an impenetrable forest of giant yellow mushrooms. No-one knew what effect this had on its inhabitants, although possibly they hadn't noticed.
The temple of Offler the Crocodile God, patron deity of the city, was now a rather ugly sugary thing constructed in five dimensions. But this was no problem because it was being eaten by a herd of giant ants.
On the other hand, not many people were left to appreciate this statement against uncontrolled civic alteration, because most of them were running for their lives. They fled across the fertile fields in a steady stream. Some had taken to boats, but this method of escape had ceased when most of the harbour area turned into a swamp in which, for no obvious reason, a couple of small pink elephants were building a nest.
Down below the panic on the roads the Luggage paddled slowly up one of the reed-lined drainage ditches. A little way ahead of it a moving wave of small alligators, rats and snapping turtles was pouring out of the water and scrambling frantically up the bank, propelled by some vague but absolutely accurate animal instinct.
The Luggage's lid was set in an expression of grim determination. It didn't want much out of the world, except for the total extinction of every other lifeform, but what it needed more than anything else now was its owner.
It was easy to see that the room was a treasury by its incredible emptiness. Doors hung off hooks. Barred alcoves had been smashed in. Lots of smashed chests lay around, and this gave Rincewind a pang of guilt and he wondered, for about two seconds, where the Luggage had got to.
There was a respectful silence, as there always is when large sums of money have just passed away. Nijel wandered off and prodded some of the chests in a forlorn search for secret drawers, as per the instructions in Chapter Eleven.
Conina reached down and picked up a small copper coin.
'How horrible,' said Rincewind eventually. 'A treasury with no treasure in it.'
The seriph stood and beamed. 'Not to worry', he said.
'But all your money has been stolen!' said Conina.
'The servants, I expect,' said Creosote. 'Very disloyal of them.'
Rincewind gave him an odd look. 'Doesn't it worry you?'
'Not much. I never really spent anything. I've often wondered what being poor was like.'
'You're going to get a huge opportunity to find out.'
'Will I need training?'
'It comes naturally,' said Rincewind. 'You pick it up as you go along.' There was a distant explosion and part of the ceiling turned to jelly.
'Erm, excuse me,' said Nijel, 'this carpet ...'
'Yes,' said Conina, 'the carpet.'
Creosote gave them a benevolent, slightly tipsy smile.
'Ah, yes. The carpet. Push the nose of the statue behind you, peach-buttocked jewel of the desert dawn.'
Conina, blushing, performed this act of minor sacrilege on a large green statue of Offler the Crocodile God.
Nothing happened. Secret compartments assiduously failed to open.
'Um. Try the left hand.'
She gave it an experimental twist. Creosote scratched his head.
'Maybe it was the right hand...'
'I should try and remember, if I were you,' said Conina sharply, when that didn't work either. 'There aren't many bits left that I'd care to pull.'
'What's that thing there?' said Rincewind.
'You're really going to hear about it if it isn't the tail,' said Conina, and gave it a kick.
There was a distant metallic groaning noise, like a saucepan in pain. The statue shuddered. It was followed by a few heavy clonks somewhere inside the wall, and Offler the Crocodile God grated ponderously aside. There was a tunnel behind him.
'My grandfather had this built for our more interesting treasure,' said Creosote. 'He was very-’ he groped for a word-’ingenious.'
'If you think I'm setting foot in there-’ Rincewind began.
'Stand aside,' said Nijel, loftily. 'I will go first.'
'There could be traps-’ said Conina doubtfully. She shot the Seriph a glance.
'Oh, probably, O gazelle of Heaven,' he said. 'I haven't been in there since I was six. There were some slabs you shouldn't tread on, I think.'
'Don't worry about that,' said Nijel, peering into the gloom of the tunnel. 'I shouldn't think there's a booby trap that I couldn't spot.'
'Had a lot of experience at this sort of thing, have you?' said Rincewind sourly.
'Well, I know Chapter Fourteen off by heart. It had illustrations,' said Nijel, and ducked into the shadows.
They waited for several minutes in what would have been a horrified hush if it wasn't for the muffled grunts and occasional thumping noises from the tunnel. Eventually Nijel's voice echoed back down to them from a distance.
'There's absolutely nothing,' he said. 'I've tried everything. It's as steady as a rock. Everything must have seized up, or something.'
Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.
'He doesn't know the first thing about traps,' she said. 'When I was five, my father made me walk all the way down a passage that he'd rigged up, just to teach me-’
'He got through, didn't he?' said Rincewind.
There was a noise like a damp finger dragged across glass, but amplified a billion times, and the floor shook.
'Anyway, we haven't got a lot of choice,' he added, and ducked into the tunnel. The others followed him. Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner's canary[20] and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained.
'This is fun,' said Creosote. 'Me, robbing my own treasury. If I catch myself I can have myself flung into the snake pit.'
'But you could throw yourself on your mercy,' said Conina, running a paranoid eye over the dusty stonework.
'Oh, no. I think I would have to teach me a lesson, as an example to myself.'
There was a little click above them. A small slab slid aside and a rusty metal hook descended slowly and jerkily. Another bar creaked out of the wall and tapped Rincewind on the shoulder. As he swung around, the first hook hung a yellowing notice on his back and retracted into the roof.
'What'd it do? What'd it do?’ screamed Rincewind, trying to read his own shoulderblades.
'It says, Kick Me,' said Conina.
A section of wall slid up beside the petrified wizard. A large boot on the end of a complicated series of metal joints gave a half-hearted wobble and then the whole thing snapped at the knee.
The three of them looked at it in silence. Then Conina said, 'We're dealing here with a warped brain, I can tell.'
Rincewind gingerly unhooked the sign and let it drop. Conina pushed past him and stalked along the passage with an air of angry caution, and when a metal hand extended itself on a spring and waggled in a friendly fashion she didn't shake it but instead traced its moulting wiring to a couple of corroded electrodes in a big glass jar.
'Your grandad was a man with a sense of humour?' she said.
'Oh, yes. Always liked a chuckle,' said Creosote.
'Oh, good,' said Conina. She prodded gingerly at a flagstone which, to Rincewind, looked no different to any of its fellows. With a sad little springy noise a moulting feather duster wobbled out of the wall at armpit height.
'I think I would have quite liked to meet the old Seriph,' she said, through gritted teeth, 'although not to shake him by the hand. You'd better give me a leg up here, wizard.'
'Pardon?'
Conina pointed irritably to a half-open stone doorway just ahead of them.
'I want to look up there,' she said. 'You just put your hands together for me to stand on, right? How do you manage to be so useless?'
'Being useful always gets me into trouble,' muttered Rincewind, trying to ignore the warm flesh brushing against his nose.
He could hear her rooting around above the door.
'I thought so,' she said.
'What is it? Fiendishly sharp spears poised to drop?'
No.'
'Spiked grill ready to skewer -?'
'It's a bucket,' said Conina flatly, giving it a push.
'What, of scalding, poisonous -?'
'Whitewash. Just a lot of old, dried-up whitewash.' Conina jumped down.
'That's grandfather for you,' said Creosote. 'Never a dull moment.'
'Well, I've just about had enough,' Conina said firmly, and pointed to the far end of the tunnel. 'Come on, you two.'
They were about three feet from the far end when Rincewind felt a movement in the air above him. Conina struck him in the small of the back, shoving him forward into the room beyond. He rolled when he hit the floor, and something nicked his foot at the same time as a loud thump deafened him.
The entire roof, a huge block of stone four feet thick, had dropped into the tunnel.
Rincewind crawled forward through the dust clouds and, with a trembling finger, traced the lettering on the side of the slab.
'Laugh This One Off,' he said.
He sat back.
'That's grandad,' said Creosote happily, 'always a-’
He intercepted Conina's gaze, which had the force of a lead pipe, and wisely shut up.
Nijel emerged from the clouds, coughing.
'I say, what happened?' he said. 'Is everyone all right? It didn't do that when I went through.'
Rincewind sought for a reply, and couldn't find anything better than, 'Didn't it?'
Light filtered into the deep room from tiny barred windows up near the roof. There was no way out except by walking through the several hundred tons of stone that blocked the tunnel or, to put it in another way, which was the way Rincewind put it, they were undoubtedly trapped. He relaxed a bit.
At least there was no mistaking the magic carpet. It lay rolled up on a raised slab in the middle of the room. Next to it was a small, sleek oil lamp and — Rincewind craned to see — a small gold ring. He groaned. A faint octarine corona hung over all three items, indicating that they were magical.
When Conina unrolled the carpet a number of small objects tumbled on to the floor, including a brass herring, a wooden ear, a few large square sequins and a lead box with a preserved soap bubble in it.
'What on earth are they?' said Nijel.
'Well,' said Rincewind, 'before they tried to eat that carpet, they were probably moths.'
'Gosh.'
'That's what you people never understand,' said Rincewind, wearily. 'You think magic is just something you can pick up and use, like a, a-’
'Parsnip?' said Nijel.
'Wine bottle?' said the Seriph.
'Something like that,' said Rincewind cautiously, but rallied somewhat and went on, 'But the truth is, is-’
'Not like that?'
'More like a wine bottle?' said the Seriph hopefully.
'Magic uses people,' said Rincewind hurriedly. 'It affects you as much as you affect it, sort of thing. You can't mess around with magical things without it affecting you. I just thought I'd better warn you.'
'Like a wine bottle,' said Creosote, 'that-’
'-drinks you back,' said Rincewind. 'So you can put down that lamp and ring for a start, and for goodness' sake don't rub anything.'
'My grandfather built up the family fortunes with them,' said Creosote wistfully. 'His wicked uncle locked him in a cave, you know. He had to set himself up with what came to hand. He had nothing in the whole world but a magic carpet, a magic lamp, a magic ring and a grotto-ful of assorted jewels.'
'Came up the hard way, did he?' said Rincewind.
Conina spread the carpet on the floor. It had a complex pattern of golden dragons on a blue background. They were extremely complicated dragons, with long beards, ears and wings, and they seemed to be frozen in motion, caught in transition from one state to another, suggesting that the loom which wove them had rather more dimensions than the usual three, but the worst thing about it was that if you looked at it long enough the pattern became blue dragons on a gold background, and a terrible feeling stole over you that if you kept on trying to see both types of dragon at once your brains would trickle out of your ears.
Rincewind tore his gaze away with some difficulty as another distant explosion rocked the building.
'How does it work?' he said.
Creosote shrugged. 'I've never used it,' he said. 'I suppose you just say "up" and "down" and things like that.'
'How about "fly through the wall"?' said Rincewind.
All three of them looked up at the high, dark and, above all, solid walls of the room.
'We could try sitting on it and saying "rise",' Nijel volunteered. 'And then, before we hit the roof, we could say, well, "stop".' He considered this for a bit, and then added, 'If that's the word.'
'Or, "drop",' said Rincewind, 'or "descend", "dive", "fall", "sink". Or "plunge".'
"Plummet",' suggested Conina gloomily.
'Of course,' said Nijel, 'with all this wild magic floating around, you could try using some of it.'
Ah-’ said Rincewind, and, 'Well-’
'You've got "wizzard" written on your hat,' said Creosote.
'Anyone can write things on their hat,' said Conina. 'You don't want to believe everything you read.'
'Now hold on a minute,' said Rincewind hotly.
They held on a minute.
They held on for a further seventeen seconds.
'Look, it's a lot harder than you think,' he said.
'What did I tell you?' said Conina. 'Come on, let's dig the mortar out with our fingernails.'
Rincewind waved her into silence, removed his hat, pointedly blew the dust off the star, put the hat on again, adjusted the brim, rolled up his sleeves, flexed his fingers and panicked.
In default of anything better to do, he leaned against the stone.
It was vibrating. It wasn't that it was being shaken; it felt that the throbbing was coming from inside the wall.
It was very much the same sort of trembling he had felt back at the University, just before the sourcerer arrived. The stone was definitely very unhappy about something.
He sidled along the wall and put his ear to the next stone, which was a smaller, wedge-shaped stone cut to fit an angle of the wall, not a big, distinguished stone, but a bantam stone, patiently doing its bit for the greater good of the wall as a whole. It was also shaking.
'Shh!' said Conina.
'I can't hear anything,' said Nijel loudly. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say "don't look now", would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn round aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash.
Anyway.
'That's the point! What happened to the war?'
A little cascade of mortar poured down from the ceiling on to Rincewind's hat.
'Something's acting on the stones,' he said quietly. 'They're trying to break free.'
'We're right underneath quite a lot of them,' observed Creosote.
There was a grinding noise above them and a shaft of daylight lanced down. To Rincewind's surprise it wasn't accompanied by sudden death from crushing. There was another silicon creak, and the hole grew. The stones were falling out, and they were falling up.
'I think,' he said, 'that the carpet might be worth a try at this point.'
The wall beside him shook itself like a dog and drifted apart, its masonry giving Rincewind several severe blows as it soared away.
The four of them landed on the blue and gold carpet in a storm of flying rock.
'We've got to get out of here,' said Nijel, keeping up his reputation for acute observation.
'Hang on,' said Rincewind. 'I'll say-’
'You won't,' snapped Conina, kneeling beside him. 'I'll say. I don't trust you.'
'But you've-’
'Shut up,' said Conina. She patted the carpet.
'Carpet — rise,' she commanded.
There was a pause.
,Up.,
'Perhaps it doesn't understand the language,' said Nijel.
'Lift. Levitate. Fly.'
'Or it could be, say, sensitive to one particular voice-’
'Shut. Up.'
'You tried up,' said Nijel. 'Try ascend.'
'Or soar,' said Creosote. Several tons of flagstone swooped past an inch from his head.
'If it was going to answer to them it would have done, wouldn't it?' said Conina. The air round her was thick with dust as the flying stones ground together. She thumped the carpet.
'Take off, you blasted mat! Arrgh!'
A piece of cornice clipped her shoulder. She rubbed the bruise irritably, and turned to Rincewind, who was sitting with his knees under his chin and his hat pulled down over his head.
'Why doesn't it work?' she said.
'You're not saying the right words,' he said.
'It doesn't understand the language?'
'Language hasn't got anything to do with it. You've neglected something fundamental.'
'Well?'
'Well what?' sniffed Rincewind.
'Look, this isn't the time to stand on your dignity!'
'You keep on trying, don't you mind me.'
'Make it fly!'
Rincewind pulled his hat further over his ears.
'Please?' said Conina.
The hat rose a bit.
'Wed all be terribly bucked,' said Nijel.
'Hear, hear,' said Creosote.
The hat rose some more. 'You're quite sure?' said Rincewind.
'Yes!'
Rincewind cleared his throat.
'Down,' he commanded.
The carpet rose from the ground and hovered expectantly a few feet over the dust.
'How did-’ Conina began, but Nijel interrupted her.
'Wizards are privy to arcane knowledge, that's probably what it is,' he said. 'Probably the carpet's got a geas on it to do the opposite of anything that's said. Can you make it go up further?'
'Yes, but I'm not going to,' said Rincewind. The carpet drifted slowly forward and, as happens so often at times like this, a rolling of masonry bounced right across the spot where it had lain.
A moment later they were out in the open air, the storm of stone behind them.
The palace was pulling itself to pieces, and the pieces were funnelling up into the air like a volcanic eruption in reverse. The sourcerous tower had completely disappeared, but the stones were dancing towards the spot where it had stood and ...
'They're building another tower!' said Nijel.
'Out of my palace, too,' said Creosote.
'The hat's won,' said Rincewind. 'That's why it's building its own tower. It's a sort of reaction. Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those ... what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?'
'Frogs.'
'Stones.'
'Unsuccessful gangsters.'
'Caddis flies is what I meant,' said Rincewind. 'When a wizard set out to fight, the first thing he always did was build a tower.'
'It's very big,' said Nijel.
Rincewind nodded glumly.
'Where are we going?' said Conina.
Rincewind shrugged.
'Away,' he said.
The outer palace wall drifted just below them. As they passed over it began to shake, and small bricks began to loop towards the storm of flying rock that buzzed around the new tower.
Eventually Conina said, 'All right. How did you get the carpet to fly? Does it really do the opposite of what you command?'
'No. I just paid attention to certain fundamental details of laminar and spatial arrangements.'
'You've lost me there,' she admitted.
'You want it in non-wizard talk?'
'Yes.'
'You put it on the floor upside down,' said Rincewind.
Conina sat very still for a while. Then she said, 'I must say this is very comfortable. It's the first time I've ever flown on a carpet.'
'It's the first time I've ever flown one,' said Rincewind vaguely.
'You do it very well,' she said.
'Thank you.'
'You said you were frightened of heights.'
'Terrified.'
'You don't show it.'
'I'm not thinking about it.'
Rincewind turned and looked at the tower behind them. It had grown quite a lot in the last minute, blossoming at the top into a complexity of turrets and battlements. A swarm of tiles was hovering over it, individual tiles swooping down and clinking into place like ceramic bees on a bombing run. It was impossibly high — the stones at the bottom would have been crushed if it wasn't for the magic that crackled through them.
Well, that was just about it as far as organised wizardry was concerned. Two thousand years of peaceful magic had gone down the drain, the towers were going up again, and with all this new raw magic floating around something was going to get very seriously hurt. Probably the universe. Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.
And, of course, it would be impossible to explain things to his companions. They didn't seem to grasp ideas properly; more particularly, they didn't seem able to get the hang of doom. They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.
The whole point about the old University organisation was that it kept a sort of peace between wizards who got along with one another about as easily as cats in a sack, and now the gloves were off anyone who tried to interfere was going to end up severely scratched. This wasn't the old, gentle, rather silly magic that the Disc was used to; this was magic war, white-hot and searing.
Rincewind wasn't very good at precognition; in fact he could barely see into the present. But he knew with weary certainty that at some point in the very near future, like thirty seconds or so, someone would say: 'Surely there's something we could do?'
The desert passed below them, lit by the low rays of the setting sun.
'There don't seem to be many stars,' said Nijel. 'Perhaps they're scared to come out.'
Rincewind looked up. There was a silver haze high in the air.
'It's raw magic settling out of the atmosphere,' he said. 'It's saturated.'
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twen-
'Surely there's-’ Conina began.
'There isn't,' said Rincewind flatly, but with just the faintest twinge of satisfaction. 'The wizards will fight each other until there's one victor. There isn't anything anyone else can do.'
'I could do with a drink,' said Creosote. 'I suppose we couldn't stop somewhere where I could buy an inn?'
'What with?' said Nijel. 'You're poor, remember?'
'Poor I don't mind,' said the Seriph. 'It's sobriety that is giving me difficulties.'
Conina prodded Rincewind gently in the ribs.
'Are you steering this thing?' she said.
No.'
'Then where is it going?'
Nijel peered downwards.
'By the look of it,' he said, 'it's going hubwards. Towards the Circle Sea.'
'Someone must be guiding it.'
Hallo, said a friendly voice in Rincewind's head.
You’re not my conscience again, are you? thought Rincewind.
I'm feeling really bad.
Well, I'm sorry, Rincewind thought, but none of this is my fault. I'm just a victim of circuses. I don't see why I should take the blame.
Yes, but you could do something about it.
Like what?
You could destroy the sourcerer. All this would collapse then.
I wouldn't stand a chance.
Then at least you could die in the attempt. That might be preferable to letting magical war break out.
'Look, just shut up, will you?' said Rincewind.
'What?' said Conina.
'Um?' said Rincewind, vaguely. He looked down blankly at the blue and gold pattern underneath him, and added, 'You're flying this, aren't you?’ Through me! That's sneaky!'
'What are you talking about?'
'Oh. Sorry. Talking to myself.'
'I think,' said Conina, 'that we'd better land.'
They glided down towards a crescent of beach where the desert reached the sea. In a normal light it would have been blinding white with a sand made up of billions of tiny shell fragments, but at this time of day it was blood-red and primordial. Ranks of driftwood, carved by the waves and bleached by the sun, were piled up on the tideline like the bones of ancient fish or the biggest floral art accessory counter in the universe. Nothing stirred, apart from the waves. There were a few rocks around, but they were firebrick hot and home to no mollusc or seaweed.
Even the sea looked arid. If any proto-amphibian emerged on to a beach like this, it would have given up there and then, gone back into the water and told all its relatives to forget the legs, it wasn't worth it. The air felt as though it had been cooked in a sock.
Even so, Nijel insisted that they light a fire.
'It's more friendly,' he said. 'Besides, there could be monsters.'
Conina looked at the oily wavelets, rolling up the beach in what appeared to be a half-hearted attempt to get out of the sea.
'In that?' she said.
'You never can tell.'
Rincewind mooched along the waterline, distractedly picking up stones and throwing them in the sea. One or two were thrown back.
After a while Conina got a fire going, and the bone-dry, salt-saturated wood sent blue and green flames roaring up under a fountain of sparks. The wizard went and sat in the dancing shadows, his back against a pile of whitened wood, wrapped in a cloud of such impenetrable gloom that even Creosote stopped complaining of thirst and shut up.
Conina woke up after midnight. There was a crescent moon on the horizon and a thin, chilly mist covered the sand. Creosote was snoring on his back. Nijel, who was theoretically on guard, was sound asleep.
Conina lay perfectly still, every sense seeking out the thing that had awoken her.
Finally she heard it again. It was a tiny, diffident clinking noise, barely audible above the muted slurp of the sea.
She got up, or rather, she slid into the vertical as bonelessly as a jellyfish, and flicked Nijel's sword out of his unresisting hand. Then she sidled through the mist without causing so much as an extra swirl.
The fire sank down further into its bed of ash. After a while Conina came back, and shook the other two awake.
'Warrizit?'
'I think you ought to see this,' she hissed. 'I think it could be important.'
'I just shut my eyes for a second-’ Nijel protested.
'Never mind about that. Come on.'
Creosote squinted around the impromptu campsite.
'Where's the wizard fellow?'
'You'll see. And don't make a noisy. It could be dangerous.'
They stumbled after her knee-deep in vapour, towards the sea.
Eventually Nijel said, 'Why dangerous-’
'Shh! Did you hear it?'
Nijel listened.
'Like a sort of ringing noise?'
'Watch...
Rincewind walked jerkily up the beach, carrying a large round rock in both hands. He walked past them without a word, his eyes staring straight ahead.
They followed him along the cold beach until he reached a bare area between the dunes, where he stopped and, still moving with all the grace of a clothes horse, dropped the rock. It made a clinking noise.
There was a wide circle of other stones. Very few of them had actually stayed on top of another one.
The three of them crouched down and watched him.
'Is he asleep?' said Creosote.
Conina nodded.
'What's he trying to do?'
'I think he's trying to build a tower.'
Rincewind lurched back into the ring of stones and, with great care, placed another rock on empty air. It fell down.
'He's not very good at it, is he,' said Nijel.
'It is very sad,' said Creosote.
'Maybe we ought to wake him up,' said Conina. 'Only I heard that if you wake up sleepwalkers their legs fall off, or something. What do you think?'
'Could be risky, with wizards,' said Nijel.
They tried to make themselves comfortable on the chilly sand.
'It's rather pathetic, isn't it?' said Creosote. 'It's not as if he's really a proper wizard.'
Conina and Nijel tried to avoid one another's gaze. Finally the boy coughed, and said, 'I'm not exactly a barbarian hero, you know. You may have noticed.'
They watched the toiling figure of Rincewind for a while, and then Conina said, 'If it comes to that, I think I lack a certain something when it comes to hairdressing.'
They both stared fixedly at the sleepwalker, busy with their own thoughts and red with mutual embarrassment.
Creosote cleared his throat.
'If it makes anyone feel better,' he said, 'I sometimes perceive that my poetry leaves a lot to be desired.'
Rincewind carefully tried to balance a large rock on a small pebble. It fell off, but he appeared to be happy with the result.
'Speaking as a poet,' said Conina carefully, 'what would you say about this situation?'
Creosote shifted uneasily. 'Funny old thing, life,' he said.
'Pretty apt.'
Nijel lay back and looked up at the hazy stars. Then he sat bolt upright.
'Did you see that?' he demanded.
'What?'
'It was a sort of flash, a kind of-’
The hubward horizon exploded into a silent flower of colour, which expanded rapidly through all the hues of the conventional spectrum before flashing into brilliant octarine. It etched itself on their eyeballs before fading away.
After a while there was a distant rumble.
'Some sort of magical weapon,' said Conina, blinking. A gust of warm wind picked up the mist and streamed it past them.
'Blow this,' said Nijel, getting to his feet. 'I'm going to wake him up, even if it means we end up carrying him.'
He reached out for Rincewind's shoulder just as something went past very high overhead, making a noise like a flock of geese on nitrous oxide. It disappeared into the desert behind them. Then there was a sound that would have set false teeth on edge, a flash of green light, and a thump.
'I'll wake him up,' said Conina. 'You get the carpet.'
She clambered over the ring of rocks and took the sleeping wizard gently by the arm, and this would have been a textbook way of waking a somnambulist if Rincewind hadn't dropped the rock he was carrying on his foot.
He opened his eyes.
'Where am I?' he said.
'On the beach. You've been ... er ... dreaming.'
Rincewind blinked at the mist, the sky, the circle of stones, Conina, the circle of stones again, and finally back at the sky.
'What's been happening?' he said.
'Some sort of magical fireworks.'
'Oh. It's started, then.'
He lurched unsteadily out of the circle, in a way that suggested to Conina that perhaps he wasn't quite awake yet, and staggered back towards the remains of the fire. He walked a few steps and then appeared to remember something.
He looked down at his foot, and said, 'Ow.'
He'd almost reached the fire when the blast from the last spell reached them. It had been aimed at the tower in Al Khali, which was twenty miles away, and by now the wavefront was extremely diffuse. It was hardly affecting the nature of things as it surged over the dunes with a faint sucking noise; the fire burned red and green for a second, one of Nijel's sandals turned into a small and irritated badger, and a pigeon flew out of the Seriph's turban.
Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.
'What was that?' said Nijel. He kicked the badger, who was sniffing at his foot.
'Hmm?' said Rincewind.
'That!'
'Oh, that,' said Rincewind. 'Just the backwash of a spell. They probably hit the tower in Al Khali.'
'It must have been pretty big to affect us here.'
'It probably was.'
'Hey, that was my palace,' said Creosote weakly. 'I mean, I know it was a lot, but it was all I had.'
'Sorry.'
'But there were people in the city!'
They're probably all right,' said Rincewind.
'Good.'
'Whatever they are.'
'What?'
Conina grabbed his arm. 'Don't shout at him,' she said. 'He's not himself.'
Ah,' said Creosote dourly, 'an improvement.'
'I say, that's a bit unfair,' Nijel protested. 'I mean, he got me out of the snake pit and, well, he knows a lot-’
'Yes, wizards are good at getting you out of the sort of trouble that only wizards can get you into,' said Creosote. 'Then they expect you to thank them.'
'Oh, I think-’
'It's got to be said,' said Creosote, waving his hands irritably. He was briefly illuminated by the passage of another spell across the tormented sky.
'Look at that!' he snapped. 'Oh, he means well. They all mean well. They probably all think the Disc would be a better place if they were in charge. Take it from me, there's nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favour. Wizards! When all's said and done, what good are they? I mean, can you name me something worthwhile any wizard's done?'
'I think that's a bit cruel,' said Conina, but with an edge in her voice that suggested that she could be open to persuasion on the subject.
'Well, they make me sick,' muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn't like it much.
'I think we'll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,' said Nijel diplomatically. 'Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.'
'My mouth feels all horrible, too,' muttered Creosote, determined to cling on to the remnant of his anger.
Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.
'He's gone!'
In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.
He hadn't wanted much, ever. He'd stuck with wizardry even though he wasn't any good at it, he'd always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he'd show them. Precisely who "they" were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.
He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.
The Luggage was having problems of its own.
The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another's clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.
Here is what it looked like.
It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.
Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn't know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallising on its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-coloured corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.
'A real magic carpet?' said Nijel.
'Listen,' said Rincewind urgently. 'I get vertigo just listening to tall stories.'
'Oh, quite,' the Seriph burped gently, 'genuine. Very pretty pattern.' He squinted at the bottle again, and sighed. 'It was a lovely blue colour,' he added.
'And you wouldn't happen to know where it is?' said Conina slowly, in the manner of one creeping up very carefully to a wild animal that might take fright at any moment.
'In the treasury. I know the way there. I'm extremely rich, you know. Or so they tell me.' He lowered his voice and tried to wink at Conina, eventually managing it with both eyes. 'We could sit on it,' he said, breaking into a sweat. 'And you could tell me a story...'
Rincewind tried to scream through gritted teeth.
His ankles were already beginning to sweat.
'I'm not going to ride on a magic carpet!' he hissed. 'I'm afraid of grounds!'
'You mean heights,' said Conina. And stop being silly.'
'I know what I mean! It's the grounds that kill you!'
The battle of Al Khali was a hammer-headed cloud, in whose roiling depths weird shapes could be heard and strange sounds were seen. Occasional misses seared across the city. Where they landed things were ... different.
For example, a large part of the soak had turned into an impenetrable forest of giant yellow mushrooms. No-one knew what effect this had on its inhabitants, although possibly they hadn't noticed.
The temple of Offler the Crocodile God, patron deity of the city, was now a rather ugly sugary thing constructed in five dimensions. But this was no problem because it was being eaten by a herd of giant ants.
On the other hand, not many people were left to appreciate this statement against uncontrolled civic alteration, because most of them were running for their lives. They fled across the fertile fields in a steady stream. Some had taken to boats, but this method of escape had ceased when most of the harbour area turned into a swamp in which, for no obvious reason, a couple of small pink elephants were building a nest.
Down below the panic on the roads the Luggage paddled slowly up one of the reed-lined drainage ditches. A little way ahead of it a moving wave of small alligators, rats and snapping turtles was pouring out of the water and scrambling frantically up the bank, propelled by some vague but absolutely accurate animal instinct.
The Luggage's lid was set in an expression of grim determination. It didn't want much out of the world, except for the total extinction of every other lifeform, but what it needed more than anything else now was its owner.
It was easy to see that the room was a treasury by its incredible emptiness. Doors hung off hooks. Barred alcoves had been smashed in. Lots of smashed chests lay around, and this gave Rincewind a pang of guilt and he wondered, for about two seconds, where the Luggage had got to.
There was a respectful silence, as there always is when large sums of money have just passed away. Nijel wandered off and prodded some of the chests in a forlorn search for secret drawers, as per the instructions in Chapter Eleven.
Conina reached down and picked up a small copper coin.
'How horrible,' said Rincewind eventually. 'A treasury with no treasure in it.'
The seriph stood and beamed. 'Not to worry', he said.
'But all your money has been stolen!' said Conina.
'The servants, I expect,' said Creosote. 'Very disloyal of them.'
Rincewind gave him an odd look. 'Doesn't it worry you?'
'Not much. I never really spent anything. I've often wondered what being poor was like.'
'You're going to get a huge opportunity to find out.'
'Will I need training?'
'It comes naturally,' said Rincewind. 'You pick it up as you go along.' There was a distant explosion and part of the ceiling turned to jelly.
'Erm, excuse me,' said Nijel, 'this carpet ...'
'Yes,' said Conina, 'the carpet.'
Creosote gave them a benevolent, slightly tipsy smile.
'Ah, yes. The carpet. Push the nose of the statue behind you, peach-buttocked jewel of the desert dawn.'
Conina, blushing, performed this act of minor sacrilege on a large green statue of Offler the Crocodile God.
Nothing happened. Secret compartments assiduously failed to open.
'Um. Try the left hand.'
She gave it an experimental twist. Creosote scratched his head.
'Maybe it was the right hand...'
'I should try and remember, if I were you,' said Conina sharply, when that didn't work either. 'There aren't many bits left that I'd care to pull.'
'What's that thing there?' said Rincewind.
'You're really going to hear about it if it isn't the tail,' said Conina, and gave it a kick.
There was a distant metallic groaning noise, like a saucepan in pain. The statue shuddered. It was followed by a few heavy clonks somewhere inside the wall, and Offler the Crocodile God grated ponderously aside. There was a tunnel behind him.
'My grandfather had this built for our more interesting treasure,' said Creosote. 'He was very-’ he groped for a word-’ingenious.'
'If you think I'm setting foot in there-’ Rincewind began.
'Stand aside,' said Nijel, loftily. 'I will go first.'
'There could be traps-’ said Conina doubtfully. She shot the Seriph a glance.
'Oh, probably, O gazelle of Heaven,' he said. 'I haven't been in there since I was six. There were some slabs you shouldn't tread on, I think.'
'Don't worry about that,' said Nijel, peering into the gloom of the tunnel. 'I shouldn't think there's a booby trap that I couldn't spot.'
'Had a lot of experience at this sort of thing, have you?' said Rincewind sourly.
'Well, I know Chapter Fourteen off by heart. It had illustrations,' said Nijel, and ducked into the shadows.
They waited for several minutes in what would have been a horrified hush if it wasn't for the muffled grunts and occasional thumping noises from the tunnel. Eventually Nijel's voice echoed back down to them from a distance.
'There's absolutely nothing,' he said. 'I've tried everything. It's as steady as a rock. Everything must have seized up, or something.'
Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.
'He doesn't know the first thing about traps,' she said. 'When I was five, my father made me walk all the way down a passage that he'd rigged up, just to teach me-’
'He got through, didn't he?' said Rincewind.
There was a noise like a damp finger dragged across glass, but amplified a billion times, and the floor shook.
'Anyway, we haven't got a lot of choice,' he added, and ducked into the tunnel. The others followed him. Many people who had got to know Rincewind had come to treat him as a sort of two-legged miner's canary[20] and tended to assume that if Rincewind was still upright and not actually running then some hope remained.
'This is fun,' said Creosote. 'Me, robbing my own treasury. If I catch myself I can have myself flung into the snake pit.'
'But you could throw yourself on your mercy,' said Conina, running a paranoid eye over the dusty stonework.
'Oh, no. I think I would have to teach me a lesson, as an example to myself.'
There was a little click above them. A small slab slid aside and a rusty metal hook descended slowly and jerkily. Another bar creaked out of the wall and tapped Rincewind on the shoulder. As he swung around, the first hook hung a yellowing notice on his back and retracted into the roof.
'What'd it do? What'd it do?’ screamed Rincewind, trying to read his own shoulderblades.
'It says, Kick Me,' said Conina.
A section of wall slid up beside the petrified wizard. A large boot on the end of a complicated series of metal joints gave a half-hearted wobble and then the whole thing snapped at the knee.
The three of them looked at it in silence. Then Conina said, 'We're dealing here with a warped brain, I can tell.'
Rincewind gingerly unhooked the sign and let it drop. Conina pushed past him and stalked along the passage with an air of angry caution, and when a metal hand extended itself on a spring and waggled in a friendly fashion she didn't shake it but instead traced its moulting wiring to a couple of corroded electrodes in a big glass jar.
'Your grandad was a man with a sense of humour?' she said.
'Oh, yes. Always liked a chuckle,' said Creosote.
'Oh, good,' said Conina. She prodded gingerly at a flagstone which, to Rincewind, looked no different to any of its fellows. With a sad little springy noise a moulting feather duster wobbled out of the wall at armpit height.
'I think I would have quite liked to meet the old Seriph,' she said, through gritted teeth, 'although not to shake him by the hand. You'd better give me a leg up here, wizard.'
'Pardon?'
Conina pointed irritably to a half-open stone doorway just ahead of them.
'I want to look up there,' she said. 'You just put your hands together for me to stand on, right? How do you manage to be so useless?'
'Being useful always gets me into trouble,' muttered Rincewind, trying to ignore the warm flesh brushing against his nose.
He could hear her rooting around above the door.
'I thought so,' she said.
'What is it? Fiendishly sharp spears poised to drop?'
No.'
'Spiked grill ready to skewer -?'
'It's a bucket,' said Conina flatly, giving it a push.
'What, of scalding, poisonous -?'
'Whitewash. Just a lot of old, dried-up whitewash.' Conina jumped down.
'That's grandfather for you,' said Creosote. 'Never a dull moment.'
'Well, I've just about had enough,' Conina said firmly, and pointed to the far end of the tunnel. 'Come on, you two.'
They were about three feet from the far end when Rincewind felt a movement in the air above him. Conina struck him in the small of the back, shoving him forward into the room beyond. He rolled when he hit the floor, and something nicked his foot at the same time as a loud thump deafened him.
The entire roof, a huge block of stone four feet thick, had dropped into the tunnel.
Rincewind crawled forward through the dust clouds and, with a trembling finger, traced the lettering on the side of the slab.
'Laugh This One Off,' he said.
He sat back.
'That's grandad,' said Creosote happily, 'always a-’
He intercepted Conina's gaze, which had the force of a lead pipe, and wisely shut up.
Nijel emerged from the clouds, coughing.
'I say, what happened?' he said. 'Is everyone all right? It didn't do that when I went through.'
Rincewind sought for a reply, and couldn't find anything better than, 'Didn't it?'
Light filtered into the deep room from tiny barred windows up near the roof. There was no way out except by walking through the several hundred tons of stone that blocked the tunnel or, to put it in another way, which was the way Rincewind put it, they were undoubtedly trapped. He relaxed a bit.
At least there was no mistaking the magic carpet. It lay rolled up on a raised slab in the middle of the room. Next to it was a small, sleek oil lamp and — Rincewind craned to see — a small gold ring. He groaned. A faint octarine corona hung over all three items, indicating that they were magical.
When Conina unrolled the carpet a number of small objects tumbled on to the floor, including a brass herring, a wooden ear, a few large square sequins and a lead box with a preserved soap bubble in it.
'What on earth are they?' said Nijel.
'Well,' said Rincewind, 'before they tried to eat that carpet, they were probably moths.'
'Gosh.'
'That's what you people never understand,' said Rincewind, wearily. 'You think magic is just something you can pick up and use, like a, a-’
'Parsnip?' said Nijel.
'Wine bottle?' said the Seriph.
'Something like that,' said Rincewind cautiously, but rallied somewhat and went on, 'But the truth is, is-’
'Not like that?'
'More like a wine bottle?' said the Seriph hopefully.
'Magic uses people,' said Rincewind hurriedly. 'It affects you as much as you affect it, sort of thing. You can't mess around with magical things without it affecting you. I just thought I'd better warn you.'
'Like a wine bottle,' said Creosote, 'that-’
'-drinks you back,' said Rincewind. 'So you can put down that lamp and ring for a start, and for goodness' sake don't rub anything.'
'My grandfather built up the family fortunes with them,' said Creosote wistfully. 'His wicked uncle locked him in a cave, you know. He had to set himself up with what came to hand. He had nothing in the whole world but a magic carpet, a magic lamp, a magic ring and a grotto-ful of assorted jewels.'
'Came up the hard way, did he?' said Rincewind.
Conina spread the carpet on the floor. It had a complex pattern of golden dragons on a blue background. They were extremely complicated dragons, with long beards, ears and wings, and they seemed to be frozen in motion, caught in transition from one state to another, suggesting that the loom which wove them had rather more dimensions than the usual three, but the worst thing about it was that if you looked at it long enough the pattern became blue dragons on a gold background, and a terrible feeling stole over you that if you kept on trying to see both types of dragon at once your brains would trickle out of your ears.
Rincewind tore his gaze away with some difficulty as another distant explosion rocked the building.
'How does it work?' he said.
Creosote shrugged. 'I've never used it,' he said. 'I suppose you just say "up" and "down" and things like that.'
'How about "fly through the wall"?' said Rincewind.
All three of them looked up at the high, dark and, above all, solid walls of the room.
'We could try sitting on it and saying "rise",' Nijel volunteered. 'And then, before we hit the roof, we could say, well, "stop".' He considered this for a bit, and then added, 'If that's the word.'
'Or, "drop",' said Rincewind, 'or "descend", "dive", "fall", "sink". Or "plunge".'
"Plummet",' suggested Conina gloomily.
'Of course,' said Nijel, 'with all this wild magic floating around, you could try using some of it.'
Ah-’ said Rincewind, and, 'Well-’
'You've got "wizzard" written on your hat,' said Creosote.
'Anyone can write things on their hat,' said Conina. 'You don't want to believe everything you read.'
'Now hold on a minute,' said Rincewind hotly.
They held on a minute.
They held on for a further seventeen seconds.
'Look, it's a lot harder than you think,' he said.
'What did I tell you?' said Conina. 'Come on, let's dig the mortar out with our fingernails.'
Rincewind waved her into silence, removed his hat, pointedly blew the dust off the star, put the hat on again, adjusted the brim, rolled up his sleeves, flexed his fingers and panicked.
In default of anything better to do, he leaned against the stone.
It was vibrating. It wasn't that it was being shaken; it felt that the throbbing was coming from inside the wall.
It was very much the same sort of trembling he had felt back at the University, just before the sourcerer arrived. The stone was definitely very unhappy about something.
He sidled along the wall and put his ear to the next stone, which was a smaller, wedge-shaped stone cut to fit an angle of the wall, not a big, distinguished stone, but a bantam stone, patiently doing its bit for the greater good of the wall as a whole. It was also shaking.
'Shh!' said Conina.
'I can't hear anything,' said Nijel loudly. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say "don't look now", would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn round aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash.
Anyway.
'That's the point! What happened to the war?'
A little cascade of mortar poured down from the ceiling on to Rincewind's hat.
'Something's acting on the stones,' he said quietly. 'They're trying to break free.'
'We're right underneath quite a lot of them,' observed Creosote.
There was a grinding noise above them and a shaft of daylight lanced down. To Rincewind's surprise it wasn't accompanied by sudden death from crushing. There was another silicon creak, and the hole grew. The stones were falling out, and they were falling up.
'I think,' he said, 'that the carpet might be worth a try at this point.'
The wall beside him shook itself like a dog and drifted apart, its masonry giving Rincewind several severe blows as it soared away.
The four of them landed on the blue and gold carpet in a storm of flying rock.
'We've got to get out of here,' said Nijel, keeping up his reputation for acute observation.
'Hang on,' said Rincewind. 'I'll say-’
'You won't,' snapped Conina, kneeling beside him. 'I'll say. I don't trust you.'
'But you've-’
'Shut up,' said Conina. She patted the carpet.
'Carpet — rise,' she commanded.
There was a pause.
,Up.,
'Perhaps it doesn't understand the language,' said Nijel.
'Lift. Levitate. Fly.'
'Or it could be, say, sensitive to one particular voice-’
'Shut. Up.'
'You tried up,' said Nijel. 'Try ascend.'
'Or soar,' said Creosote. Several tons of flagstone swooped past an inch from his head.
'If it was going to answer to them it would have done, wouldn't it?' said Conina. The air round her was thick with dust as the flying stones ground together. She thumped the carpet.
'Take off, you blasted mat! Arrgh!'
A piece of cornice clipped her shoulder. She rubbed the bruise irritably, and turned to Rincewind, who was sitting with his knees under his chin and his hat pulled down over his head.
'Why doesn't it work?' she said.
'You're not saying the right words,' he said.
'It doesn't understand the language?'
'Language hasn't got anything to do with it. You've neglected something fundamental.'
'Well?'
'Well what?' sniffed Rincewind.
'Look, this isn't the time to stand on your dignity!'
'You keep on trying, don't you mind me.'
'Make it fly!'
Rincewind pulled his hat further over his ears.
'Please?' said Conina.
The hat rose a bit.
'Wed all be terribly bucked,' said Nijel.
'Hear, hear,' said Creosote.
The hat rose some more. 'You're quite sure?' said Rincewind.
'Yes!'
Rincewind cleared his throat.
'Down,' he commanded.
The carpet rose from the ground and hovered expectantly a few feet over the dust.
'How did-’ Conina began, but Nijel interrupted her.
'Wizards are privy to arcane knowledge, that's probably what it is,' he said. 'Probably the carpet's got a geas on it to do the opposite of anything that's said. Can you make it go up further?'
'Yes, but I'm not going to,' said Rincewind. The carpet drifted slowly forward and, as happens so often at times like this, a rolling of masonry bounced right across the spot where it had lain.
A moment later they were out in the open air, the storm of stone behind them.
The palace was pulling itself to pieces, and the pieces were funnelling up into the air like a volcanic eruption in reverse. The sourcerous tower had completely disappeared, but the stones were dancing towards the spot where it had stood and ...
'They're building another tower!' said Nijel.
'Out of my palace, too,' said Creosote.
'The hat's won,' said Rincewind. 'That's why it's building its own tower. It's a sort of reaction. Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those ... what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?'
'Frogs.'
'Stones.'
'Unsuccessful gangsters.'
'Caddis flies is what I meant,' said Rincewind. 'When a wizard set out to fight, the first thing he always did was build a tower.'
'It's very big,' said Nijel.
Rincewind nodded glumly.
'Where are we going?' said Conina.
Rincewind shrugged.
'Away,' he said.
The outer palace wall drifted just below them. As they passed over it began to shake, and small bricks began to loop towards the storm of flying rock that buzzed around the new tower.
Eventually Conina said, 'All right. How did you get the carpet to fly? Does it really do the opposite of what you command?'
'No. I just paid attention to certain fundamental details of laminar and spatial arrangements.'
'You've lost me there,' she admitted.
'You want it in non-wizard talk?'
'Yes.'
'You put it on the floor upside down,' said Rincewind.
Conina sat very still for a while. Then she said, 'I must say this is very comfortable. It's the first time I've ever flown on a carpet.'
'It's the first time I've ever flown one,' said Rincewind vaguely.
'You do it very well,' she said.
'Thank you.'
'You said you were frightened of heights.'
'Terrified.'
'You don't show it.'
'I'm not thinking about it.'
Rincewind turned and looked at the tower behind them. It had grown quite a lot in the last minute, blossoming at the top into a complexity of turrets and battlements. A swarm of tiles was hovering over it, individual tiles swooping down and clinking into place like ceramic bees on a bombing run. It was impossibly high — the stones at the bottom would have been crushed if it wasn't for the magic that crackled through them.
Well, that was just about it as far as organised wizardry was concerned. Two thousand years of peaceful magic had gone down the drain, the towers were going up again, and with all this new raw magic floating around something was going to get very seriously hurt. Probably the universe. Too much magic could wrap time and space around itself, and that wasn't good news for the kind of person who had grown used to things like effects following things like causes.
And, of course, it would be impossible to explain things to his companions. They didn't seem to grasp ideas properly; more particularly, they didn't seem able to get the hang of doom. They suffered from the terrible delusion that something could be done. They seemed prepared to make the world the way they wanted it or die in the attempt, and the trouble with dying in the attempt was that you died in the attempt.
The whole point about the old University organisation was that it kept a sort of peace between wizards who got along with one another about as easily as cats in a sack, and now the gloves were off anyone who tried to interfere was going to end up severely scratched. This wasn't the old, gentle, rather silly magic that the Disc was used to; this was magic war, white-hot and searing.
Rincewind wasn't very good at precognition; in fact he could barely see into the present. But he knew with weary certainty that at some point in the very near future, like thirty seconds or so, someone would say: 'Surely there's something we could do?'
The desert passed below them, lit by the low rays of the setting sun.
'There don't seem to be many stars,' said Nijel. 'Perhaps they're scared to come out.'
Rincewind looked up. There was a silver haze high in the air.
'It's raw magic settling out of the atmosphere,' he said. 'It's saturated.'
Twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twen-
'Surely there's-’ Conina began.
'There isn't,' said Rincewind flatly, but with just the faintest twinge of satisfaction. 'The wizards will fight each other until there's one victor. There isn't anything anyone else can do.'
'I could do with a drink,' said Creosote. 'I suppose we couldn't stop somewhere where I could buy an inn?'
'What with?' said Nijel. 'You're poor, remember?'
'Poor I don't mind,' said the Seriph. 'It's sobriety that is giving me difficulties.'
Conina prodded Rincewind gently in the ribs.
'Are you steering this thing?' she said.
No.'
'Then where is it going?'
Nijel peered downwards.
'By the look of it,' he said, 'it's going hubwards. Towards the Circle Sea.'
'Someone must be guiding it.'
Hallo, said a friendly voice in Rincewind's head.
You’re not my conscience again, are you? thought Rincewind.
I'm feeling really bad.
Well, I'm sorry, Rincewind thought, but none of this is my fault. I'm just a victim of circuses. I don't see why I should take the blame.
Yes, but you could do something about it.
Like what?
You could destroy the sourcerer. All this would collapse then.
I wouldn't stand a chance.
Then at least you could die in the attempt. That might be preferable to letting magical war break out.
'Look, just shut up, will you?' said Rincewind.
'What?' said Conina.
'Um?' said Rincewind, vaguely. He looked down blankly at the blue and gold pattern underneath him, and added, 'You're flying this, aren't you?’ Through me! That's sneaky!'
'What are you talking about?'
'Oh. Sorry. Talking to myself.'
'I think,' said Conina, 'that we'd better land.'
They glided down towards a crescent of beach where the desert reached the sea. In a normal light it would have been blinding white with a sand made up of billions of tiny shell fragments, but at this time of day it was blood-red and primordial. Ranks of driftwood, carved by the waves and bleached by the sun, were piled up on the tideline like the bones of ancient fish or the biggest floral art accessory counter in the universe. Nothing stirred, apart from the waves. There were a few rocks around, but they were firebrick hot and home to no mollusc or seaweed.
Even the sea looked arid. If any proto-amphibian emerged on to a beach like this, it would have given up there and then, gone back into the water and told all its relatives to forget the legs, it wasn't worth it. The air felt as though it had been cooked in a sock.
Even so, Nijel insisted that they light a fire.
'It's more friendly,' he said. 'Besides, there could be monsters.'
Conina looked at the oily wavelets, rolling up the beach in what appeared to be a half-hearted attempt to get out of the sea.
'In that?' she said.
'You never can tell.'
Rincewind mooched along the waterline, distractedly picking up stones and throwing them in the sea. One or two were thrown back.
After a while Conina got a fire going, and the bone-dry, salt-saturated wood sent blue and green flames roaring up under a fountain of sparks. The wizard went and sat in the dancing shadows, his back against a pile of whitened wood, wrapped in a cloud of such impenetrable gloom that even Creosote stopped complaining of thirst and shut up.
Conina woke up after midnight. There was a crescent moon on the horizon and a thin, chilly mist covered the sand. Creosote was snoring on his back. Nijel, who was theoretically on guard, was sound asleep.
Conina lay perfectly still, every sense seeking out the thing that had awoken her.
Finally she heard it again. It was a tiny, diffident clinking noise, barely audible above the muted slurp of the sea.
She got up, or rather, she slid into the vertical as bonelessly as a jellyfish, and flicked Nijel's sword out of his unresisting hand. Then she sidled through the mist without causing so much as an extra swirl.
The fire sank down further into its bed of ash. After a while Conina came back, and shook the other two awake.
'Warrizit?'
'I think you ought to see this,' she hissed. 'I think it could be important.'
'I just shut my eyes for a second-’ Nijel protested.
'Never mind about that. Come on.'
Creosote squinted around the impromptu campsite.
'Where's the wizard fellow?'
'You'll see. And don't make a noisy. It could be dangerous.'
They stumbled after her knee-deep in vapour, towards the sea.
Eventually Nijel said, 'Why dangerous-’
'Shh! Did you hear it?'
Nijel listened.
'Like a sort of ringing noise?'
'Watch...
Rincewind walked jerkily up the beach, carrying a large round rock in both hands. He walked past them without a word, his eyes staring straight ahead.
They followed him along the cold beach until he reached a bare area between the dunes, where he stopped and, still moving with all the grace of a clothes horse, dropped the rock. It made a clinking noise.
There was a wide circle of other stones. Very few of them had actually stayed on top of another one.
The three of them crouched down and watched him.
'Is he asleep?' said Creosote.
Conina nodded.
'What's he trying to do?'
'I think he's trying to build a tower.'
Rincewind lurched back into the ring of stones and, with great care, placed another rock on empty air. It fell down.
'He's not very good at it, is he,' said Nijel.
'It is very sad,' said Creosote.
'Maybe we ought to wake him up,' said Conina. 'Only I heard that if you wake up sleepwalkers their legs fall off, or something. What do you think?'
'Could be risky, with wizards,' said Nijel.
They tried to make themselves comfortable on the chilly sand.
'It's rather pathetic, isn't it?' said Creosote. 'It's not as if he's really a proper wizard.'
Conina and Nijel tried to avoid one another's gaze. Finally the boy coughed, and said, 'I'm not exactly a barbarian hero, you know. You may have noticed.'
They watched the toiling figure of Rincewind for a while, and then Conina said, 'If it comes to that, I think I lack a certain something when it comes to hairdressing.'
They both stared fixedly at the sleepwalker, busy with their own thoughts and red with mutual embarrassment.
Creosote cleared his throat.
'If it makes anyone feel better,' he said, 'I sometimes perceive that my poetry leaves a lot to be desired.'
Rincewind carefully tried to balance a large rock on a small pebble. It fell off, but he appeared to be happy with the result.
'Speaking as a poet,' said Conina carefully, 'what would you say about this situation?'
Creosote shifted uneasily. 'Funny old thing, life,' he said.
'Pretty apt.'
Nijel lay back and looked up at the hazy stars. Then he sat bolt upright.
'Did you see that?' he demanded.
'What?'
'It was a sort of flash, a kind of-’
The hubward horizon exploded into a silent flower of colour, which expanded rapidly through all the hues of the conventional spectrum before flashing into brilliant octarine. It etched itself on their eyeballs before fading away.
After a while there was a distant rumble.
'Some sort of magical weapon,' said Conina, blinking. A gust of warm wind picked up the mist and streamed it past them.
'Blow this,' said Nijel, getting to his feet. 'I'm going to wake him up, even if it means we end up carrying him.'
He reached out for Rincewind's shoulder just as something went past very high overhead, making a noise like a flock of geese on nitrous oxide. It disappeared into the desert behind them. Then there was a sound that would have set false teeth on edge, a flash of green light, and a thump.
'I'll wake him up,' said Conina. 'You get the carpet.'
She clambered over the ring of rocks and took the sleeping wizard gently by the arm, and this would have been a textbook way of waking a somnambulist if Rincewind hadn't dropped the rock he was carrying on his foot.
He opened his eyes.
'Where am I?' he said.
'On the beach. You've been ... er ... dreaming.'
Rincewind blinked at the mist, the sky, the circle of stones, Conina, the circle of stones again, and finally back at the sky.
'What's been happening?' he said.
'Some sort of magical fireworks.'
'Oh. It's started, then.'
He lurched unsteadily out of the circle, in a way that suggested to Conina that perhaps he wasn't quite awake yet, and staggered back towards the remains of the fire. He walked a few steps and then appeared to remember something.
He looked down at his foot, and said, 'Ow.'
He'd almost reached the fire when the blast from the last spell reached them. It had been aimed at the tower in Al Khali, which was twenty miles away, and by now the wavefront was extremely diffuse. It was hardly affecting the nature of things as it surged over the dunes with a faint sucking noise; the fire burned red and green for a second, one of Nijel's sandals turned into a small and irritated badger, and a pigeon flew out of the Seriph's turban.
Then it was past and boiling out over the sea.
'What was that?' said Nijel. He kicked the badger, who was sniffing at his foot.
'Hmm?' said Rincewind.
'That!'
'Oh, that,' said Rincewind. 'Just the backwash of a spell. They probably hit the tower in Al Khali.'
'It must have been pretty big to affect us here.'
'It probably was.'
'Hey, that was my palace,' said Creosote weakly. 'I mean, I know it was a lot, but it was all I had.'
'Sorry.'
'But there were people in the city!'
They're probably all right,' said Rincewind.
'Good.'
'Whatever they are.'
'What?'
Conina grabbed his arm. 'Don't shout at him,' she said. 'He's not himself.'
Ah,' said Creosote dourly, 'an improvement.'
'I say, that's a bit unfair,' Nijel protested. 'I mean, he got me out of the snake pit and, well, he knows a lot-’
'Yes, wizards are good at getting you out of the sort of trouble that only wizards can get you into,' said Creosote. 'Then they expect you to thank them.'
'Oh, I think-’
'It's got to be said,' said Creosote, waving his hands irritably. He was briefly illuminated by the passage of another spell across the tormented sky.
'Look at that!' he snapped. 'Oh, he means well. They all mean well. They probably all think the Disc would be a better place if they were in charge. Take it from me, there's nothing more terrible than someone out to do the world a favour. Wizards! When all's said and done, what good are they? I mean, can you name me something worthwhile any wizard's done?'
'I think that's a bit cruel,' said Conina, but with an edge in her voice that suggested that she could be open to persuasion on the subject.
'Well, they make me sick,' muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn't like it much.
'I think we'll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,' said Nijel diplomatically. 'Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.'
'My mouth feels all horrible, too,' muttered Creosote, determined to cling on to the remnant of his anger.
Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.
'He's gone!'
In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.
He hadn't wanted much, ever. He'd stuck with wizardry even though he wasn't any good at it, he'd always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he'd show them. Precisely who "they" were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.
He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.
The Luggage was having problems of its own.
The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another's clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.
Here is what it looked like.
It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.
Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn't know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallising on its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-coloured corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.