Sourcery (27 page)

‘I shall smash the lamp,' she said quietly.

The genie flashed her a smile and spoke hastily into the thing he was cradling between his chin and his shoulder.

‘Fine,' he said. ‘Great. It's a slice, believe me. Have your people call my people. Stay beyond, okay? Bye.' He lowered the instrument. ‘Bastard,' he said vaguely.

‘I really shall smash the lamp,' said Conina.

‘Which lamp is this?' said the genie hurriedly.

‘How many have you got?' said Nijel. ‘I always thought genies had just the one.'

The genie explained wearily that in fact he had several lamps. There was a small but well-appointed lamp where he lived during the week, another rather unique lamp in the country, a carefully restored peasant rushlight in an unspoilt wine-growing district near Quirm, and just recently a set of derelict lamps in the docks area of Ankh-Morpork that had great potential, once the smart crowd got there, to become the occult equivalent of a suite of offices and a wine bar.

They listened in awe, like fish who had inadvertently swum into a lecture on how to fly.

‘Who are your people the other people have got to call?' said Nijel, who was impressed, although he didn't know why or by what.

‘Actually, I don't have any people yet,' said the genie, and gave a grimace that was definitely upwardly-mobile at the corners. ‘But I will.'

‘Everyone shut up,' said Conina firmly, ‘and
you
, take us to Ankh-Morpork.'

‘I should, if I were you,' said Creosote. ‘When the young lady's mouth looks like a letter box, it's best to do what she says.'

The genie hesitated.

‘I'm not very deep on transport,' he said.

‘Learn,' said Conina. She was tossing the lamp from hand to hand.

‘Teleportation is a major headache,' said the genie, looking desperate. ‘Why don't we do lun—'

‘Right, that's it,' said Conina. ‘Now I just need a couple of big flat rocks—'

‘Okay, okay. Just hold hands, will you? I'll give it my best shot, but this could be one big mistake—'

The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc's greatest philosopher
²²
, who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was
very large
.

And so psychic order was restored. Distance is, however, an entirely subjective phenomenon and creatures of magic can adjust it to suit themselves.

They are not necessarily very good at it.

Rincewind sat dejectedly in the blackened ruins of the Library, trying to put his finger on what was wrong with them.

Well, everything, for a start. It was unthinkable that the Library should be burned. It was the largest accumulation of magic on the Disc. It underpinned wizardry. Every spell ever used was written down in it somewhere. Burning them was, was, was . . .

There weren't any ashes. Plenty of wood ashes, lots of chains, lots of blackened stone, lots of mess. But thousands of books don't burn easily. They would leave bits of cover and piles of feathery ash. And there wasn't any.

Rincewind stirred the rubble with his toe.

There was only the one door into the Library. Then there were the cellars – he could see the stairs down to them, choked with garbage – but you couldn't hide all the books down there. You couldn't teleport them out either, they would be resistant to such magic; anyone who tried something like that would end up wearing his brains outside his hat.

There was an explosion overhead. A ring of orange fire formed about halfway up the tower of sourcery, ascended quickly and soared off towards Quirm.

Rincewind slid around on his makeshift seat and stared up at the Tower of Art. He got the distinct impression that it was looking back at him. It was totally without windows, but for a moment he thought he saw a movement up among the crumbling turrets.

He wondered how old the tower really was. Older than the University, certainly. Older than the city, which had formed about it like scree around a mountain. Maybe older than geography. There had been a time when the continents were different, Rincewind understood, and then they'd sort of shuffled more comfortably together like puppies in a basket. Perhaps the tower had been washed up on the waves of rock, from somewhere else. Maybe it had been there before the Disc itself, but Rincewind didn't like to consider that, because it raised uncomfortable questions about who built it and what for.

He examined his conscience.

It said: I'm out of options. Please yourself.

Rincewind stood up and brushed the dust and ash off his robe, removing quite a lot of the moulting red plush as well. He removed his hat, made a preoccupied attempt at straightening the point, and replaced it on his head.

Then he walked unsteadily towards the Tower of Art.

There was a very old and quite small door at the base. He wasn't at all surprised when it opened as he approached.

‘Strange place,' said Nijel. ‘Funny curve to the walls.'

‘Where are we?' said Conina.

‘And is there any alcohol?' said Creosote. ‘Probably not,' he added.

‘And why is it rocking?' said Conina. ‘I've never been anywhere with metal walls before.' She sniffed. ‘Can you smell oil?' she added, suspiciously.

The genie reappeared, although this time without the smoke and erratic trapdoor effects. It was noticeable that he tried to keep as far away from Conina as politely possible.

‘Everyone okay?' he said.

‘Is this Ankh?' she said. ‘Only when we wanted to go there, we rather hoped you'd put us somewhere with a door.'

‘You're on your way,' said the genie.

‘In what?'

Something about the way in which the spirit hesitated caused Nijel's mind to leap a tall conclusion from a standing start. He looked down at the lamp in his hands.

He gave it an experimental jerk. The floor shook.

‘Oh, no,' he said. ‘It's physically impossible.'

‘We're in the
lamp
?' said Conina.

The room trembled again as Nijel tried to look down the spout.

‘Don't worry about it,' said the genie. ‘In fact, don't think about it if possible.'

He explained – although ‘explained' is probably too positive a word, and in this case really means failed to explain but at some length – that it was perfectly possible to travel across the world in a small lamp being carried by one of the party, the lamp itself moving because it was being carried by one of the people inside it, because of a) the fractal nature of reality, which meant that everything could be thought of as being inside everything else and b) creative public relations. The trick relied on the laws of physics failing to spot the flaw until the journey was complete.

‘In the circumstances it is best not to think about it, yuh?' said the genie.

‘Like not thinking about pink rhinoceroses,' said Nijel, and gave an embarrassed laugh as they stared at him.

‘It was a sort of game we had,' he said. ‘You had to avoid thinking of pink rhinoceroses.' He coughed. ‘I didn't say it was a particularly good game.'

He squinted down the spout again.

‘No,' said Conina, ‘not very.'

‘Uh,' said the genie. ‘Would anyone like coffee? Some sounds? A quick game of Significant Quest?'
²³

‘Drink?' said Creosote.

‘White wine?'

‘Foul muck.'

The genie looked shocked.

‘Red is bad for—' it began.

‘—but any port in a storm,' said Creosote hurriedly. ‘Or sauterne, even. But no umbrella in it.' It dawned on the Seriph that this wasn't the way to talk to the genie. He pulled himself together a bit. ‘No umbrella, by the Five Moons of Nasreem. Or bits of fruit salad or olives or curly straws or ornamental monkeys, I command thee by the Seventeen Siderites of Sarudin.'

‘I'm not an umbrella person,' said the genie sulkily.

‘It's pretty sparse in here,' said Conina. ‘Why don't you furnish it?'

‘What I don't understand,' said Nijel, ‘is, if we're all in the lamp I'm holding, then the me in the lamp is holding a smaller lamp and in
that
lamp—'

The genie waved his hands urgently.

‘Don't talk about it!' he commanded. ‘Please!'

Nijel's honest brow wrinkled. ‘Yes, but,' he said, ‘is there a lot of me, or what?'

‘It's all cyclic, but stop drawing attention to it, yuh? . . . Oh, shit.'

There was the subtle, unpleasant sound of the universe suddenly catching on.

It was dark in the tower, a solid core of antique darkness that had been there since the dawn of time and resented the intrusion of the upstart daylight that nipped in around Rincewind.

He felt the air move as the door shut behind him and the dark poured back, filling up the space where the light had been so neatly that you couldn't have seen the join even if the light had still been there.

The interior of the tower smelled of antiquity, with a slight suspicion of raven droppings.

It took a great deal of courage to stand there in that dark. Rincewind didn't have that much, but stood there anyway.

Something started to snuffle around his feet, and Rincewind stood very still. The only reason he didn't move was for fear of treading on something worse.

Then a hand like an old leather glove touched his, very gently, and a voice said: ‘Oook.'

Rincewind looked up.

The dark yielded, just once, to a vivid flash of light. And Rincewind saw.

The whole tower was lined with books. They were squeezed on every step of the rotting spiral staircase that wound up inside. They were piled up on the floor, although something about the way in which they were piled suggested that the word ‘huddled' would be more appropriate. They had lodged – all right, they had perched – on every crumbling ledge.

They were observing him, in some covert way that had nothing to do with the normal six senses. Books are pretty good at conveying meaning, not necessarily their own personal meanings of course, and Rincewind grasped the fact that they were trying to tell him something.

There was another flash. He realised that it was magic from the sourcerer's tower, reflected down from the distant hole that led on to the roof.

At least it enabled him to identify Wuffles, who was wheezing at his right foot. That was a bit of a relief. Now if he could just put a name to the soft, repetitive slithering noise near his left ear...

There was a further obliging flash, which found him looking directly into the little yellow eyes of the Patrician, who was clawing patiently at the side of his glass jar. It was a gentle, mindless scrabbling, as if the little lizard wasn't particularly trying to get out but was just vaguely interested in seeing how long it would take to wear the glass away.

Rincewind looked down at the pear-shaped bulk of the Librarian.

‘There's thousands of them,' he whispered, his voice being sucked away and silenced by the massed ranks of books. ‘How did you get them all in here?'

‘Oook oook.'

‘They what?'

‘Oook,' repeated the Librarian, making vigorous flapping motions with his bald elbows.

‘Fly?'

‘Oook.'

‘Can they do that?'

‘Oook,' nodded the Librarian.

‘That must have been pretty impressive. I'd like to see that one day.'

‘Oook.'

Not every book had made it. Most of the important grimoires had got out but a seven-volume herbal had lost its index to the flames and many a trilogy was mourning for its lost volume. Quite a few books had scorch marks on their bindings; some had lost their covers, and trailed their stitching unpleasantly on the floor.

A match flared, and pages rippled uneasily around the walls. But it was only the Librarian, who lit a candle and shambled across the floor at the base of a menacing shadow big enough to climb skyscrapers. He had set up a rough table against one wall and it was covered with arcane tools, pots of rare adhesives and a bookbinder's vice which was already holding a stricken folio. A few weak lines of magic fire crawled across it.

The ape pushed the candlestick into Rincewind's hand, picked up a scalpel and a pair of tweezers, and bent low over the trembling book. Rincewind went pale.

‘Um,' he said, ‘er, do you mind if I go away? I faint at the sight of glue.'

The Librarian shook his head and jerked a preoccupied thumb towards a tray of tools.

‘Oook,' he commanded. Rincewind nodded miserably, and obediently handed him a pair of long-nosed scissors. The wizard winced as a couple of damaged pages were snipped free and dropped to the floor.

‘What are you doing to it?' he managed.

‘Oook.'

‘An appendectomy? Oh.'

The ape jerked his thumb again, without looking up. Rincewind fished a needle and thread out of the ranks on the tray and handed them over. There was silence broken only by the scritching sound of thread being pulled through paper until the Librarian straightened up and said:

‘Oook.'

Rincewind pulled out his handkerchief and mopped the ape's brow.

‘Oook.'

‘Don't mention it. Is it – going to be all right?'

The Librarian nodded. There was also a general almost inaudible sigh of relief from the tier of books above them.

Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vice.

‘All right,' he mumbled, ‘but what can I do about it?'