Sourcery (28 page)

‘Oook.' The Librarian gave Rincewind a look that would have been exactly like a quizzical look over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles, if he had been wearing any, and reached for another broken book.

‘I mean, you know I'm not good at magic.'

‘Oook.'

‘The sourcery that's about now, it's terrible stuff. I mean, it's the original stuff, from right back to the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.'

‘Oook.'

‘It'll destroy everything eventually, won't it?'

‘Oook.'

‘It's about time someone put a stop to this sourcery, right?'

‘Oook.'

‘Only it can't be me, you see. When I came here I thought I could do something, but that tower! It's so big! It must be proof against all magic! If really powerful wizards won't do anything about it, how can I?'

‘Oook,' agreed the Librarian, sewing a ruptured spine.

‘So, you see, I think someone else can save the world this time. I'm no good at it.'

The ape nodded, reached across and lifted Rincewind's hat from his head.

‘Hey!'

The Librarian ignored him, picked up a pair of shears.

‘Look, that's my hat, if you don't mind
don't you dare do that to my
—'

He leapt across the floor and was rewarded with a thump across the side of the head, which would have astonished him if he'd had time to think about it; the Librarian might shuffle around the place like a good-natured wobbly balloon, but underneath that oversized skin was a framework of superbly cantilevered bone and muscle that could drive a fist-ful of calloused knuckles through a thick oak plank. Running into the Librarian's arm was like hitting a hairy iron bar.

Wuffles started to bounce up and down, yelping with excitement.

Rincewind screamed a hoarse, untranslatable yell of fury, bounced off the wall, snatched up a fallen rock as a crude club, kicked forward and stopped dead.

The Librarian was crouched in the centre of the floor with the shears touching – but not yet cutting – the hat.

And he was grinning at Rincewind.

They stood like a frozen tableau for some seconds. Then the ape dropped the shears, flicked several imaginary flecks of dust off the hat, straightened the point, and placed it on Rincewind's head.

A few shocked moments after this Rincewind realised that he was holding up, at arm's length, a very large and extremely heavy rock. He managed to force it away on one side before it recovered from the shock and remembered to fall on him.

‘I see,' he said, sinking back against the wall and rubbing his elbows. ‘And all that's supposed to tell me something, is it? A moral lesson, let Rincewind confront his true self, let him work out what he's really prepared to fight for. Eh? Well, it was a very cheap trick. And I've news for you. If you think it worked—' he snatched the hat brim – ‘if you think it worked. If you think I've. You've got another thought. Listen, it's. If you think.'

His voice stuttered into silence. Then he shrugged.

‘All right. But when you get down to it, what can I actually do?'

The Librarian replied with an expansive gesture that indicated, as clearly as if he had said ‘ook', that Rincewind was a wizard with a hat, a library of magical books and a tower. This could be regarded as everything a magical practitioner could need. An ape, a small terrier with halitosis and a lizard in a jar were optional extras.

Rincewind felt a slight pressure on his foot. Wuffles, who was extremely slow on the uptake, had fastened his toothless gums on the toe of Rincewind's boot and was giving it a vicious suck.

He picked the little dog up by the scruff of its neck and the bristly stub that, for the want of a better word, it called its tail, and gently lifted it sideways.

‘Okay,' he said. ‘You'd better tell me what's been happening here.'

From the Carrack Mountains, overlooking the vast cold Sto Plain in the middle of which Ankh-Morpork sprawled like a bag of dropped groceries, the view was particularly impressive. Mishits and ricochets from the magical battle were expanding outwards and upwards, in a bowl-shaped cloud of curdled air at the heart of which strange lights flashed and sparkled.

The roads leading away from it were packed with refugees, and every inn and wayside tavern was crowded out. Or nearly every one.

No one seemed to want to stop at the rather pleasant little pub nestling among trees just off the road to Quirm. It wasn't that they were frightened to go inside, it was just that, for the moment, they weren't being allowed to notice it.

There was a disturbance in the air about half a mile away and three figures dropped out of nowhere into a thicket of lavender.

They lay supine in the sunshine among the broken, fragrant branches, until their sanity came back. Then Creosote said, ‘Where are we, do you suppose?'

‘It smells like someone's underwear drawer,' said Conina.

‘Not mine,' said Nijel, firmly.

He eased himself up gently and added, ‘Has anyone seen the lamp?'

‘Forget it. It's probably been sold to build a wine-bar,' said Conina.

Nijel scrabbled around among the lavender stems until his hands found something small and metallic.

‘Got it!' he declared.

‘Don't rub it!' said the other two, in harmony. They were too late anyway, but that didn't much matter, because all that happened when Nijel gave it a cautious buff was the appearance of some small smoking red letters in mid-air.

‘“Hi”,' Nijel read aloud. ‘“Do not put down the lamp, because your custom is important to us. Please leave a wish after the tone and, very shortly, it will be our command. In the meantime, have a nice eternity.”' He added, ‘You know, I think he's a bit over-committed.'

Conina said nothing. She was staring out across the plains to the broiling storm of magic. Occasionally some of it would detach and soar away to some distant tower. She shivered, despite the growing heat of the day.

‘We ought to get down there as soon as possible,' she said. ‘It's very important.'

‘Why?' said Creosote. One glass of wine hadn't really restored him to his former easygoing nature.

Conina opened her mouth, and – quite unusually for her – shut it again. There was no way to explain that every gene in her body was dragging her onwards, telling her that she should get involved; visions of swords and spiky balls on chains kept invading the hairdressing salons of her consciousness.

Nijel, on the other hand, felt no such pounding. All he had to drive him onwards was imagination, but he did have enough of that to float a medium-sized war galley. He looked towards the city with what would have been, but for his lack of chin, an expression of set-jawed determination.

Creosote realised that he was outnumbered.

‘Do they have any drink down there?' he said.

‘Lots,' said Nijel.

‘That might do for a start,' the Seriph conceded. ‘All right, lead on, O peach-breasted daughter of—'

‘And no poetry.'

They untangled themselves from the thicket and walked down the hillside until they reached the road which, before very long, went past the aforementioned tavern or, as Creosote persisted in calling it, caravan-serai.

They hesitated about going in. It didn't seem to welcome visitors. But Conina, who by breeding and upbringing tended to skulk around the back of buildings, found four horses tethered in the yard.

They considered them carefully.

‘It would be stealing,' said Nijel, slowly.

Conina opened her mouth to agree and the words ‘Why not?' slid past her lips. She shrugged.

‘Perhaps we should leave some money—' Nijel suggested.

‘Don't look at me,' said Creosote.

‘—or maybe write a note and leave it under the bridle. Or something. Don't you think?'

By way of an answer Conina vaulted up on to the largest horse, which by the look of it belonged to a soldier. Weaponry was slung all over it.

Creosote hoisted himself uneasily on to the second horse, a rather skittish bay, and sighed.

‘She's got that letter-box look,' he said. ‘I should do what she says.'

Nijel regarded the other two horses suspiciously. One of them was very large and extremely white, not the off-white which was all that most horses could manage, but a translucent, ivory white tone which Nijel felt an unconscious urge to describe as ‘shroud'. It also gave him a distinct impression that it was more intelligent than he was.

He selected the other one. It was a bit thin, but docile, and he managed to get on after only two tries.

They set off.

The sound of their hoofbeats barely penetrated the gloom inside the tavern. The innkeeper moved like someone in a dream. He knew he had customers, he'd even spoken to them, he could even see them sitting round a table by the fire, but if asked to describe
who
he'd talked to and
what
he had seen he'd have been at a loss. This is because the human brain is remarkably good at shutting out things it doesn't want to know. His could currently have shielded a bank vault.

And the drinks! Most of them he'd never heard of, but strange bottles kept appearing on the shelves above the beer barrels. The trouble was that whenever he tried to think about it, his thoughts just slid away . . .

The figures around the table looked up from their cards.

One of them raised a hand. It's stuck on the end of his arm and it's got five fingers, the innkeeper's mind said. It must be a hand.

One thing the innkeeper's brain couldn't shut out was the sound of the voices. This one sounded as though someone was hitting a rock with a roll of sheet lead.

B
AR PERSON
.

The innkeeper groaned faintly. The thermic lances of horror were melting their way steadily through the steel door of his mind.

L
ET ME SEE
,
NOW
. T
HAT
'
S A
–
WHAT WAS IT AGAIN
?

‘A Bloody Mary.'
This
voice made a simple drinks order sound like the opening of hostilities.

O
H
,
YES
. A
ND
—

‘
Mine was a small egg nog
,' said Pestilence.

A
N EGG NOG
.

‘
With a cherry in it
.'

G
OOD
, lied the heavy voice. A
ND THAT
'
LL BE A SMALL PORT WINE FOR ME AND
, the speaker glanced across the table at the fourth member of the quartet and sighed,
YOU
'
D BETTER BRING ANOTHER BOWL OF PEANUTS
.

About three hundred yards down the road the horse thieves were trying to come to terms with a new experience.

‘Certainly a smooth ride,' Nijel managed eventually.

‘And a lovely – a lovely view,' said Creosote, his voice lost in the slipstream.

‘But I wonder,' said Nijel, ‘if we have done exactly the right thing.'

‘We're moving, aren't we?' demanded Conina. ‘Don't be petty.'

‘It's just that, well, looking at cumulus clouds from
above
is—'

‘Shut up.'

‘Sorry.'

‘Anyway, they're stratus. Strato-cumulus at most.'

‘Right,' said Nijel miserably.

‘Does it make any difference?' said Creosote, who was lying flat on his horse's neck with his eyes shut.

‘About a thousand feet.'

‘Oh.'

‘Could be seven hundred and fifty,' conceded Conina.

‘Ah.'

The tower of sourcery trembled. Coloured smoke rolled through its vaulted rooms and shining corridors. In the big room at the very tip, where the air was thick and greasy and tasted of burning tin, many wizards had passed out with the sheer mental effort of the battle. But enough remained. They sat in a wide circle, locked in concentration.

It was just possible to see the shimmering in the air as the raw sourcery swirled out of the staff in Coin's hand and into the centre of the octogram.

Outlandish shapes appeared for a brief instant and vanished. The very fabric of reality was being put through the wringer in there.

Carding shuddered, and turned away in case he saw anything he really couldn't ignore.

The surviving senior wizards had a simulacrum of the Disc hovering in front of them. As Carding looked at it again the little red glow over the city of Quirm flared and went out.

The air creaked.

‘There goes Quirm,' murmured Carding.

‘That just leaves Al Khali,' said one of the others.

‘There's some clever power there.'

Carding nodded glumly. He'd quite liked Quirm, which was a – had been a pleasant little city overlooking the Rim Ocean.

He dimly recalled being taken there, once, when he was small. For a moment he gazed sadly into the past. It had wild geraniums, he recalled, filling the sloping cobbled streets with their musky fragrance.

‘Growing out of the walls,' he said out loud. ‘Pink. They were pink.'

The other wizards looked at him oddly. One or two, of a particularly paranoid frame of mind even for wizards, glanced suspiciously at the walls.

‘Are you all right?' said one of them.

‘Um?' said Carding. ‘Oh. Yes, sorry. Miles away.'

He turned back to look at Coin, who was sitting off to one side of the circle with the staff across his knees. The boy appeared to be asleep. Perhaps he was. But Carding knew in the tormented pit of his soul that the staff didn't sleep. It was watching him, testing his mind.

It knew. It even knew about the pink geraniums.

‘I never wanted it to be like this,' he said softly. ‘All we really wanted was a bit of respect.'

‘Are you
sure
you're all right?'