The Light Fantastic (5 page)

The guest paused in the middle of another unsuccessful attempt to light up.

“What shay?” he said, toothlessly.

“I said: What is it that a man may call the greatest things in life?”

The warriors leaned closer. This should be worth hearing.

The guest thought long and hard and then said, with deliberation: “Hot water, good dentishtry and shoft lavatory paper.”

Brilliant octarine light flared in the forge. Galder Weatherwax, stripped to the waist, his face hidden by a mask of smoked glass, squinted into the glow and brought a hammer down with surgical precision. The magic squealed and writhed in the tongs but still he worked it, drawing it into a line of agonized fire.

A floorboard creaked. Galder had spent many hours tuning them, always a wise precaution with an ambitious assistant who walked like a cat.

D-flat. That meant he was just to the right of the door.

“Ah, Trymon,” he said, without turning, and noted with some satisfaction the faint indrawing of breath behind him. “Good of you to come. Shut the door, will you?”

Trymon pushed the heavy door, his face expressionless. On the high shelf above him various bottled impossibilities wallowed in their pickle jars and watched him with interest.

Like all wizards’ workshops, the place looked as though a taxidermist had dropped his stock in a foundry and then had a fight with a maddened glass-blower, braining a passing crocodile in the process (it hung from the ceiling and smelled strongly of camphor). There were lamps and rings that Trymon itched to rub, and mirrors that looked as though they could repay a second glance. A pair of seven-league boots stirred restlessly in a cage. A whole library of grimoires, not of course as powerful as the Octavo but still heavy with spells, creaked and rattled their chains as they sensed the wizard’s covetous glance on them. The naked power of it all stirred him as nothing else could, but he deplored the scruffiness and Galder’s sense of theater.

For example, he happened to know that the green liquid bubbling mysteriously through a maze of contorted pipework on one of the benches was just green dye with soap in it, because he’d bribed one of the servants.

One day, he thought, it’s all going to go. Starting with that bloody alligator. His knuckles whitened…

“Well, now,” said Galder cheerfully, hanging up his apron and sitting back in his chair with the lion paw arms and duck legs, “You sent me this memmy-thing.”

Trymon shrugged. “Memo. I merely pointed out, lord, that the other Orders have all sent agents to Skund Forest to recapture the spell, while you do nothing,” he said. “No doubt you will reveal your reasons in good time.”

“Your faith shames me,” said Galder.

“The wizard who captures the spell will bring great honor on himself and his order,” said Trymon. “The others have used boots and all manner of elsewhere spells. What do you propose using, master?”

“Did I detect a hint of sarcasm there?”

“Absolutely not, master.”

“Not even a smidgeon?”

“Not even the merest smidgeon, master.”

“Good. Because I don’t propose to go.” Galder reached down and picked up an ancient book. He mumbled a command and it creaked open; a bookmark suspiciously like a tongue flicked back into the binding.

He fumbled down beside his cushion and produced a little leather bag of tobacco and a pipe the size of an incinerator. With all the skill of a terminal nicotine addict he rubbed a nut of tobacco between his hands and tamped it into the bowl. He snapped his fingers and fire flared. He sucked deep, sighed with satisfaction…

…looked up.

“Still here, Trymon?”

“You summoned me, master,” said Trymon levelly. At least, that’s what his voice said. Deep in his gray eyes was the faintest glitter that said he had a list of every slight, every patronizing twinkle, every gentle reproof, every knowing glance, and for every single one Galder’s living brain was going to spend a year in acid.

“Oh, yes, so I did. Humor the deficiencies of an old man,” said Galder pleasantly. He held up the book he had been reading.

“I don’t hold with all this running about,” he said. “It’s all very dramatic, mucking about with magic carpets and the like, but it isn’t true magic to my mind. Take seven-league boots, now. If men were meant to walk twenty-one miles at a step I am sure God would have given us longer legs…Where was I?”

“I am not sure,” said Trymon coldly.

“Ah, yes. Strange that we could find nothing about the Pyramid of Tsort in the Library, you would have thought there’d be something, wouldn’t you?”

“The librarian will be disciplined, of course.”

Galder looked sideways at him. “Nothing drastic,” he said. “Withold his bananas, perhaps.”

They looked at each other for a moment.

Galder broke off first—looking hard at Trymon always bothered him. It had the same disconcerting effect as gazing into a mirror and seeing no one there.

“Anyway,” he said, “strangely enough, I found assistance elsewhere. In my own modest bookshelves, in fact. The journal of Skrelt Changebasket, the founder of our order. You, my keen young man who would rush off so soon, do you know what happens when a wizard dies?”

“Any spells he has memorized say themselves,” said Trymon. “It is one of the first things we learn.”

“In fact it is not true of the original Eight Great Spells. By dint of close study Skrelt learned that a Great Spell will simply take refuge in the nearest mind open and ready to receive it. Just push the big mirror over here, will you?”

Galder got to his feet and shuffled across to the forge, which was now cold. The strand of magic still writhed, though, at once present and not present, like a slit cut into another universe full of hot blue light. He picked it up easily, took a longbow from a rack, said a word of power, and watched with satisfaction as the magic grasped the ends of the bow and then tightened until the wood creaked. Then he selected an arrow.

Trymon had tugged a heavy, full-length mirror into the middle of the floor. When I am head of the Order, he told himself, I certainly won’t shuffle around in carpet slippers.

Trymon, as mentioned earlier, felt that a lot could be done by fresh blood if only the dead wood could be removed—but, just for the moment, he was genuinely interested in seeing what the old fool would do next.

He may have derived some satisfaction if he had known that Galder and Skrelt Changebasket were both absolutely wrong.

Galder made a few passes in front of the glass, which clouded over and then cleared to show an aerial view of the Forest of Skund. He looked at it intently while holding the bow with the arrow pointing vaguely at the ceiling. He muttered a few words like “allow for wind speed of, say, three knots” and “adjust for temperature” and then, with a rather disappointing movement, released the arrow.

If the laws of action and reaction had anything to do with it, it should have flopped to the ground a few feet away. But no one was listening to them.

With a sound that defies description, but which for the sake of completeness can be thought of basically as “spang!” plus three days hard work in any decently equipped radiophonic workshop, the arrow vanished.

Galder threw the bow aside and grinned.

“Of course, it’ll take about an hour to get there,” he said. “Then the spell will simply follow the ionized path back here. To me.”

“Remarkable,” said Trymon, but any passing telepath would have read in letters ten yards high: If you, then why not me? He looked down at the cluttered workbench, when a long and very sharp knife looked tailor-made for what he suddenly had in mind.

Violence was not something he liked to be involved in except at one remove. But the Pyramid of Tsort had been quite clear about the rewards for whoever brought all eight spells together at the right time, and Trymon was not about to let years of painstaking work go for nothing because some old fool had a bright idea.

“Would you like some cocoa while we’re waiting?” said Galder, hobbling across the room to the servants’ bell.

“Certainly,” said Trymon. He picked up the knife, weighing it for balance and accuracy. “I must congratulate you, master. I can see that we must all get up very early in the morning to get the better of you.”

Galder laughed. And the knife left Trymon’s hand at such speed that (because of the somewhat sluggish nature of Disc light) it actually grew a bit shorter and a little more massive as it plunged, with unerring aim, toward Galder’s neck.

It didn’t reach it. Instead, it swerved to one side and began a fast orbit—so fast that Galder appeared suddenly to be wearing a metal collar. He turned around, and to Trymon it seemed that he had suddenly grown several feet taller and much more powerful.

The knife broke away and shuddered into the door a mere shadow’s depth from Trymon’s ear.

“Early in the morning?” said Galder pleasantly. “My dear lad, you will need to stay up all night.”

“Have a bit more table,” said Rincewind.

“No thanks, I don’t like marzipan,” said Twoflower. “Anyway, I’m sure it’s not right to eat other people’s furniture.”

“Don’t worry,” said Swires. “The old witch hasn’t been seen for years. They say she was done up good and proper by a couple of young tearaways.”

“Kids of today,” commented Rincewind.

“I blame the parents,” said Twoflower.

Once you had made the necessary mental adjustments, the gingerbread cottage was quite a pleasant place. Residual magic kept it standing and it was shunned by such local wild animals who hadn’t already died of terminal tooth decay. A bright fire of licorice logs burned rather messily in the fireplace; Rincewind had tried gathering wood outside, but had given up. It’s hard to burn wood that talks to you.

He belched.

“This isn’t very healthy,” he said. “I mean, why sweets? Why not crispbread and cheese? Or salami, now—I could just do with a nice salami sofa.”

“Search me,” said Swires. “Old Granny Whitlow just did sweets. You should have seen her meringues—”

“I have,” said Rincewind, “I looked at the mattresses…”

“Gingerbread is more traditional,” said Twoflower.

“What, for mattresses?”

“Don’t be silly,” said Twoflower reasonably. “Whoever heard of a gingerbread mattress?”

Rincewind grunted. He was thinking of food—more accurately, of food in Ankh-Morpork. Funny how the old place seemed more attractive the farther he got from it. He only had to close his eyes to picture, in dribbling detail, the food stalls of a hundred different cultures in the market places. You could eat squishi or shark’s fin soup so fresh that swimmers wouldn’t go near it, and—

“Do you think I could buy this place?” said Twoflower. Rincewind hesitated. He’d found it always paid to think very carefully before answering Twoflower’s more surprising questions.

“What for?” he said, cautiously.

“Well, it just reeks of ambience.”

“Oh.”

“What’s ambience?” said Swires, sniffing cautiously and wearing the kind of expression that said that he hadn’t done it, whatever it was.

“I think it’s a kind of frog,” said Rincewind. “Anyway, you can’t buy this place because there isn’t anyone to buy it
from
—”

“I think I could probably arrange that, on behalf of the forest council of course,” interrupted Swires, trying to avoid Rincewind’s glare.

“—and anyway you couldn’t take it with you, I mean, you could hardly pack it in the Luggage, could you?” Rincewind indicated the Luggage, which was lying by the fire and managing in some quite impossible way to look like a contented but alert tiger, and then looked back at Twoflower. His face fell.

“Could you?” he repeated.

He had never quite come to terms with the fact that the inside of the Luggage didn’t seem to inhabit quite the same world as the outside. Of course, this was simply a byproduct of its essential weirdness, but it was disconcerting to see Twoflower fill it full of dirty shirts and old socks and then open the lid again on a pile of nice crisp laundry, smelling faintly of lavender. Twoflower also bought a lot of quaint native artifacts or, as Rincewind would put it, junk, and even a seven-foot ceremonial pig tickling pole seemed to fit inside quite easily without sticking out anywhere.

“I don’t know,” said Twoflower. “You’re a wizard, you know about these things.”

“Yes, well, of course, but baggage magic is a highly specialized art,” said Rincewind. “Anyway, I’m sure the gnomes wouldn’t really want to sell it, it’s, it’s—” he groped through what he knew of Twoflower’s mad vocabulary—“it’s a tourist attraction.”

“What’s that?” said Swires, interestedly.

“It means that lots of people like him will come and look at it,” said Rincewind.

“Why?”

“Because—” Rincewind groped for words “—it’s quaint. Um, oldey worldey. Folkloresque. Er, a delightful example of a vanished folk art, steeped in the traditions of an age long gone.”

“It is?” said Swires, looking at the cottage in bewilderment.

“Yes.”

“All that?”

“’Fraid so.”

“I’ll help you pack.”

And the night wears on, under a blanket of lowering clouds which covers most of the Disc—which is fortuitous, because when it clears and the astrologers get a good view of the sky they are going to get angry and upset.

And in various parts of the forest parties of wizards are getting lost, and going around in circles, and hiding from each other, and getting upset because whenever they bump into a tree it apologizes to them. But, unsteadily though it may be, many of them are getting quite close to the cottage…

Which is a good time to get back to the rambling buildings of Unseen University and in particular the apartments of Greyhald Spold, currently the oldest wizard on the Disc and determined to keep it that way.

He has just been extremely surprised and upset.

For the last few hours he has been very busy. He may be deaf and a little hard of thinking, but elderly wizards have very well-trained survival instincts, and they know that when a tall figure in a black robe and the latest in agricultural hand tools starts looking thoughtfully at you it is time to act fast. The servants have been dismissed. The doorways have been sealed with a paste made from powdered mayflies, and protective octograms have been drawn on the windows. Rare and rather smelly oils have been poured in complex patterns on the floor, in designs which hurt the eyes and suggest the designer was drunk or from some other dimension or, possibly, both; in the very center of the room is the eightfold octogram of Witholding, surrounded by red and green candles. And in the center of that is a box made from wood of the curlyfern pine, which grows to a great age, and it is lined with red silk and yet more protective amulets. Because Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place.