Sourcery (34 page)

‘What, just like that?' said Nijel.

‘Yes.'

‘I don't believe it,' said Conina. She was beginning to crouch, her knuckles whitening.

‘It is true,' said Coin. ‘Everything I say is true. It has to be.'

‘I want to—' Conina began, and Coin stood up, extended a hand and said, ‘Stop.'

She froze. Nijel stiffened in mid-frown.

‘You will leave,' said Coin, in a pleasant, level voice, ‘and you will ask no more questions. You will be totally satisfied. You have all your answers. You will live happily ever after. You will forget hearing these words. You will go now.'

They turned slowly and woodenly, like puppets, and trooped to the door. The Librarian opened it for them, ushered them through and shut it behind them.

Then he stared at Coin, who sagged back on to the stool.

‘All right, all right,' said the boy, ‘but it was only a little magic. I had to. You said yourself people had to forget.'

‘Oook?'

‘I can't help it! It's too easy to change things!' He clutched his head. ‘I've only got to
think
of something! I can't stay, everything I touch goes wrong, it's like trying to sleep on a heap of eggs! This world is too thin!
Please tell me what to do!
'

The Librarian spun around on his bottom a few times, a sure sign of deep thought.

Exactly what he said is not recorded, but Coin smiled, nodded, shook the Librarian's hand, and opened his own hands and drew them up and around him and stepped into another world. It had a lake in, and some distant mountains, and a few pheasants watching him suspiciously from under the trees. It was the magic all sourcerers learned, eventually.

Sourcerers never become part of the world. They merely wear it for a while.

He looked back, halfway across the turf, and waved at the Librarian. The ape gave him an encouraging nod.

And then the bubble shrank inside itself, and the last sourcerer vanished from this world and into a world of his own.

Although it has nothing much to do with the story, it is an interesting fact that, about five hundred miles away, a small flock, or rather in this case a herd, of birds were picking their way cautiously through the trees. They had heads like a flamingo, bodies like a turkey, and legs like a Sumo wrestler; they walked in a jerky, bobbing fashion, as though their heads were attached to their feet by elastic bands. They belonged to a species unique even among Disc fauna, in that their prime means of defence was to cause a predator to laugh so much that they could run away before it recovered.

Rincewind would have been vaguely satisfied to know that they were geas.

Custom was slow in the Mended Drum. The troll chained to the doorpost sat in the shade and reflectively picked someone out of his teeth.

Creosote was singing softly to himself. He had discovered beer and wasn't having to pay for it, because the coinage of compliments – rarely employed by the swains of Ankh – was having an astonishing effect on the landlord's daughter. She was a large, good-natured girl, with a figure that was the colour and, not to put too fine a point on it, the same shape as unbaked bread. She was intrigued. No one had ever referred to her breasts as jewelled melons before.

‘Absolutely,' said the Seriph, sliding peacefully off his bench, ‘no doubt about it.' Either the big yellow sort or the small green ones with huge warty veins, he told himself virtuously.

‘And what was that about my hair?' she said encouragingly, hauling him back and refilling his glass.

‘Oh.' The Seriph's brow wrinkled. ‘Like a goat of flocks that grazes on the slopes of Mount Wossname, and no mistake. And as for your ears,' he added quickly, ‘no pink-hued shells that grace the sea-kissed sands of—'

‘Exactly
how
like a flock of goats?' she said.

The Seriph hesitated. He'd always considered it one of his best lines. Now it was meeting Ankh-Morpork's famous literal-mindedness head-on for the first time. Strangely enough, he felt rather impressed.

‘I mean, in size, shape or smell?' she went on.

‘I think,' said the Seriph, ‘that perhaps the phrase I had in mind was exactly
not
like a flog of gits.'

‘Ah?' The girl pulled the flagon towards her.

‘And I think perhaps I would like another drink,' he said indistinctly, ‘and then – and then—' He looked sideways at the girl, and took the plunge. ‘Are you much of a raconteur?'

‘What?'

He licked his suddenly dry lips. ‘I mean, do you know many stories?' he croaked.

‘Oh, yes. Lots.'

‘Lots?' whispered Creosote. Most of his concubines only knew the same old one or two.

‘Hundreds. Why, do you want to hear one?'

‘What, now?'

‘If you like. It's not very busy in here.'

Perhaps I did die, Creosote thought. Perhaps this is Paradise. He took her hands. ‘You know,' he said, ‘it's ages since I've had a good narrative. But I wouldn't want you to do anything you don't want to.'

She patted his arm. What a nice old gentleman, she thought. Compared to some we get in here.

‘There's one my granny used to tell me. I know it backwards,' she said.

Creosote sipped his beer and watched the wall in a warm glow. Hundreds, he thought. And she knows some of them
backwards
.

She cleared her throat, and said, in a sing-song voice that made Creosote's pulse fuse. ‘There was a man and he had eight sons—'

The Patrician sat by his window, writing. His mind was full of fluff as far as the last week or two was concerned, and he didn't like that much.

A servant had lit a lamp to dispel the twilight, and a few early evening moths were orbiting it. The Patrician watched them carefully. For some reason he felt very uneasy in the presence of glass but that, as he stared fixedly at the insects, wasn't what bothered him most.

What bothered him was that he was fighting a terrible urge to catch them with his tongue.

And Wuffles lay on his back at his master's feet, and barked in his dreams.

Lights were going on all over the city, but the last few strands of sunset illuminated the gargoyles as they helped one another up the long climb to the roof.

The Librarian watched them from the open door, while giving himself a philosophic scratch. Then he turned and shut out the night.

It was warm in the Library. It was
always
warm in the Library, because the scatter of magic that produced the glow also gently cooked the air.

The Librarian looked at his charges approvingly, made his last rounds of the slumbering shelves, and then dragged his blanket underneath his desk, ate a goodnight banana, and fell asleep.

Silence gradually reclaimed the Library. Silence drifted around the remains of a hat, heavily battered and frayed and charred around the edges, that had been placed with some ceremony in a niche in the wall. No matter how far a wizard goes, he will always come back for his hat.

Silence filled the University in the same way that air fills a hole. Night spread across the Disc like plum jam, or possibly blackberry preserve.

But there would be a morning. There would always be another morning.

THE END

 

FOOTNOTES

 

¹
Like rhinestones, but different river. When it comes to glittering objects, wizards have all the taste and self-control of a deranged magpie.

²
A magical accident in the Library, which as has already been indicated is not a place for your average rubber-stamp-and-Dewey-decimal employment, had some time ago turned the Librarian into an orang-utan. He had since resisted all efforts to turn him back. He liked the handy long arms, the prehensile toes and the right to scratch himself in public, but most of all he liked the way all the big questions of existence had suddenly resolved themselves into a vague interest in where his next banana was coming from. It wasn't that he was unaware of the despair and nobility of the human condition. It was just that as far as he was concerned you could stuff it.

³
The furrow left by the fleeing gargoyles caused the University's head gardener to bite through his rake and led to the famous quotation: ‘How do you get a lawn like this? You mows it and you rolls it for five hundred years and then a bunch of bastards walks across it.'

⁴
In most old libraries the books are chained to the shelves to prevent them being damaged by people. In the Library of Unseen University, of course, it's more or less the other way about.

⁵
At least, by anyone who wanted to wake up the same shape, or even the same species, as they went to bed.

⁶
The vermine is a small black and white relative of the lemming, found in the cold Hublandish regions. Its skin is rare and highly valued, especially by the vermine itself; the selfish little bastard will do anything rather than let go of it.

⁷
This was because Gritoller had swallowed the jewels for safe keeping.

⁸
The Ankh-Morpork Merchants' Guild publication
Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke, Citie of One Thousand Surprises
describes the area of Old Morpork known as The Shades as ‘a folklorique network of old alleys and picturesque streets, wherree exitment and romans lurkes arounde everry corner and much may be heard the traditinal street cries of old time also the laughing visages of the denuizens as they goe about their business private.' In other words, you have been warned.

⁹
The study of genetics on the Disc had failed at an early stage, when wizards tried the experimental crossing of such well known subjects as fruit flies and sweet peas. Unfortunately they didn't quite grasp the fundamentals, and the resultant offspring – a sort of green bean thing that buzzed – led a short sad life before being eaten by a passing spider.

¹⁰
The overwhelming majority of citizens being defined in this case as everyone not currently hanging upside down over a scorpion pit.

¹¹
Wizards' tastes in the matter of puns are about the same as their taste in glittery objects.

¹²
Of course, Ankh-Morpork's citizens had always claimed that the river water was incredibly pure in any case. Any water that had passed through so many kidneys, they reasoned, had to be very pure indeed.

¹³
No one ever had the courage to ask him what he did there.

¹⁴
Or up, or obliquely. The layout of the Library of Unseen University was a topographical nightmare, the sheer presence of so much stored magic twisting dimensions and gravity into the kind of spaghetti that would make M.C. Escher go for a good lie down, or possibly sideways.

¹⁵
The Hashishim, who derived their name from the vast quantities of
hashish
they consumed, were unique among vicious killers in being both deadly and, at the same time, inclined to giggle, groove to interesting patterns of light and shade on their terrible knife blades and, in extreme cases, fall over.

¹⁶
Although, possibly, quicker. And only licensed to carry fourteen people.

¹⁷
In a truly magical universe everything has its opposite. For example, there's anti-light. That's not the same as darkness, because darkness is merely the absence of light. Anti-light is what you get if you pass through darkness and
out the other side
. On the same basis, a state of knurdness isn't like sobriety. By comparison, sobriety is like having a bath in cotton wool. Knurdness strips away all illusion, all the comforting pink fog in which people normally spend their lives, and lets them see and think clearly for the first time ever. Then, after they've screamed a bit, they make sure they never get knurd again.

¹⁸
For a description of the chimera we shall turn to Broomfog's famous bestiary
Anima Unnaturale
: ‘It have thee legges of an mermade, the hair of an tortoise, the teeth of an fowel, and the winges of an snake. Of course, I have only my worde for it, the beast having the breathe of an furnace and the temperament of an rubber balloon in a hurricane.'

¹⁹
Of course, wizards often killed one another by ordinary, non-magical means, but this was perfectly allowable and death by assassination was considered natural causes for a wizard.

²⁰
All right. But you've got the general idea.

²¹
It was a Fullomyth, an invaluable aid for all whose business is with the arcane and hermetic. It contained lists of things that didn't exist and, in a very significant way, weren't important. Some of its pages could only be read after midnight, or by strange and improbable illuminations. There were descriptions of underground constellations and wines as yet unfermented. For the really up-to-the-epoch occultist, who could afford the version bound in spider skin, there was even an insert showing the London Underground with the three stations they never dare show on the public maps.

²²
He always argued that he was.

²³
Very popular among gods, demi-gods, daemons and other supernatural creatures, who feel at home with questions like ‘What is It all About?' and ‘Where will It all End?'

²⁴
Although this was the only way in which they resembled the idols built, in response to ancient and unacknowledged memories, by children in snowy weather; it was extremely unlikely that this Ice Giant would be a small mound of grubby ice with a carrot in it by the morning.

²⁵
Which wisely decided not to fly again, was never claimed, and lived out the rest of its days as the carriage horse of an elderly lady. What War did about this is unrecorded; it is pretty certain that he got another one.