The Light Fantastic (6 page)

He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defense against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind.

And right beside him, very close to his ear, a voice has just said: D
ARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT
?

It began to snow. The barleysugar windows of the cottage showed bright and cheerful against the blackness.

At one side of the clearing three tiny red points of light glowed momentarily and there was the sound of a chesty cough, abruptly silenced.

“Shut up!” hissed a third rank wizard. “They’ll hear us!”

“Who will? We gave the lads from the Brotherhood of the Hoodwink the slip in the swamp, and those idiots from the Venerable Council of Seers went off the wrong way anyway.”

“Yeah,” said the most junior wizard, “but who keeps talking to us? They say this is a magic wood, it’s full of goblins and wolves and—”

“Trees,” said a voice out of the darkness, high above. It possessed what can only be described as timbre.

“Yeah,” said the youngest wizard. He sucked on his dogend, and shivered.

The leader of the party peered over the rock and watched the cottage.

“Right then,” he said, knocking out his pipe on the heel of his seven-league boot, who squeaked in protest. “We rush in, we grab them, we’re away. Okay?”

“You sure it’s just people?” said the youngest wizard nervously.

“Of course I’m sure,” snarled the leader. “What do you expect, three bears?”

“There could be monsters. This is the sort of wood that has monsters.”

“And trees,” said a friendly voice from the branches.

“Yeah,” said the leader, cautiously.

Rincewind looked carefully at the bed. It was quite a nice little bed, in a sort of hard toffee inlaid with caramel, but he’d rather eat it than sleep in it and it looked as though someone already had.

“Someone’s been eating my bed,” he said.

“I like toffee,” said Twoflower defensively.

“If you don’t watch out the fairy will come and take all your teeth away,” said Rincewind.

“No, that’s elves,” said Swires from the dressing table. “Elves do that. Toenails, too. Very touchy at times, elves can be.”

Twoflower sat down heavily on his bed.

“You’ve got it wrong,” he said. “Elves are noble and beautiful and wise and fair; I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

Swires and Rincewind’s kneecap exchanged glances.

“I think you must be thinking about different elves,” the gnome said slowly. “We’ve just got the other sort around here. Not that you could call them quick-tempered,” he added hastily. “Not if you didn’t want to take your teeth home in your hat, anyway.”

There was the tiny, distinctive sound of a nougat door opening. At the same time, from the other side of the cottage, came the faintest of tinkles, like a rock smashing a barleysugar window as delicately as possible.

“What was that?” said Twoflower.

“Which one?” said Rincewind.

There was the clonk of a heavy branch banging against the windowsill. With a cry of “Elves!” Swires scuttled across the floor to a mouse hole and vanished.

“What shall we do?” said Twoflower.

“Panic?” said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry saber-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying “What a magnificent brute!” and “Here, pussy.”

“There’s a cupboard,” said Twoflower, pointing to a narrow door that was squeezed between the wall and the chimneybreast. They scrambled into sweet, musty darkness.

There was the creak of a chocolate floorboard outside. Someone said “I heard voices.”

Someone else said, “Yeah, downstairs. I think it’s the Hoodwinkers.”

“I thought you said we’d given them the slip!”

“Hey, you two, you can eat this place! Here, look you can—”

“Shut up!”

There was a lot more creaking, and a muffled scream from downstairs where a Venerable Seer, creeping carefully through the darkness from the broken window, had trodden on the fingers of a Hoodwinker who was hiding under the table. There was the sudden zip and zing of magic.

“Bugger!” said a voice outside. “They’ve got him! Let’s go!”

There was more creaking, and then silence. After a while Twoflower said, “Rincewind, I think there’s a broomstick in this cupboard.”

“Well, what’s so unusual about that?”

“This one’s got handlebars.”

There was a piercing shriek from below. In the darkness a wizard had tried to open the Luggage’s lid. A crash from the scullery indicated the sudden arrival of a party of Illuminated Mages of the Unbroken Circle.

“What do you think they’re after?” whispered Twoflower.

“I don’t know, but I think it might be a good idea not to find out,” said Rincewind thoughtfully.

“You could be right.”

Rincewind pushed open the door gingerly. The room was empty. He tiptoed across to the window, and looked down into the upturned faces of three Brothers of the Order of Midnight.

“That’s him!”

He drew back hurriedly and rushed for the stairs.

The scene below was indescribable but since that statement would earn the death penalty in the reign of Olaf Quimby II the attempt better be made. Firstly, most of the struggling wizards were trying to illuminate the scene by various flames, fireballs and magical glows, so the overall lighting gave the impression of a disco in a strobe-light factory; each man was trying to find a position from which he could see the rest of the room without being attacked himself, and absolutely everyone was trying to keep out of the way of the Luggage, which had two Venerable Seers pinned in a corner and was snapping its lid at anyone who approached. But one wizard did happen to look up.

“It’s him!”

Rincewind jerked back, and something bumped into him. He looked around hurriedly, and stared when he saw Twoflower sitting on the broomstick—which was floating in midair.

“The witch must have left it behind!” said Twoflower. “A genuine magic broomstick!”

Rincewind hesitated. Octarine sparks were spitting off the broomstick’s bristles and he hated heights almost more than anything else, but what he really hated more than anything at all was a dozen very angry and bad-tempered wizards rushing up the stairs toward him, and this was happening.

“All right,” he said, “but I’ll drive.”

He lashed out with a boot at a wizard who was halfway through a Spell of Binding and jumped onto the broomstick, which bobbed down the stairwell and then turned upside down so that Rincewind was horribly eye to eye with a Brother of Midnight.

He yelped and gave the handlebars a convulsive twist.

Several things happened at once. The broomstick shot forward and broke through the wall in a shower of crumbs; the Luggage surged forward and bit the Brother in the leg; and with a strange whistling sound an arrow appeared from nowhere, missed Rincewind by inches, and struck the Luggage’s lid with a very solid thud.

The Luggage vanished.

In a little village deep in the forest an ancient shaman threw a few more twigs on his fire and stared through the smoke at his shamefaced apprentice.

“A box with legs on?” he said.

“Yes, master. It just appeared out of the sky and looked at me,” said the apprentice.

“It had eyes then, this box?”

“N—” began the apprentice and stopped, puzzled. The old man frowned.

“Many have seen Topaxci, God of the Red Mushroom, and they earn the name of shaman,” he said. “Some have seen Skelde, spirit of the smoke, and they are called sorcerers. A few have been privileged to see Umcherrel, the soul of the forest, and they are known as spirit masters. But none have seen a box with hundreds of legs that looked at them without eyes, and they are known as idio—”

The interruption was caused by a sudden screaming noise and a flurry of snow and sparks that blew the fire across the dark hut; there was a brief blurred vision and then the opposite wall was blasted aside and the apparition vanished.

There was a long silence. Then a slightly shorter silence. Then the old shaman said carefully, “You didn’t just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?”

The boy looked at him levelly. “Certainly not,” he said.

The old man heaved a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness for that,” he said. “Neither did I.”

The cottage was in turmoil, because not only did the wizards want to follow the broomstick, they also wanted to prevent each other from doing so, and this led to several regrettable incidents. The most spectacular, and certainly the most tragic, happened when one Seer attempted to use his seven-league boots without the proper sequence of spells and preparations. Seven-league boots, as has already been intimated, are a tricksy form of magic at best, and he remembered too late that the utmost caution must be taken in using a means of transport which, when all is said and done, relies for its effectiveness on trying to put one foot twenty-one miles in front of the other.

The first snowstorms of winter were raging, and in fact there was a suspiciously heavy covering of cloud over most of the Disc. And yet, from far above and by the silver light of the Discworld’s tiny moon, it presented one of the most beautiful sights in the multiverse.

Great streamers of cloud, hundreds of miles along, swirled from the waterfall at the Rim to the mountains of the Hub. In the cold crystal silence the huge white spiral glittered frostily under the stars, imperceptibly turning, very much as though God had stirred His coffee and then poured the cream in.

Nothing disturbed the glowing scene, which—

Something small and distant broke through the cloud layer, trailing shreds of vapor. In the stratospheric calm the sounds of bickering came sharp and clear.

“You said you could fly one of these things!”

“No I didn’t; I just said you couldn’t!”

“But I’ve never been on one before!”

“What a coincidence!”

“Anyway, you said—
Look at the sky!
”

“No I didn’t!”

“What’s happened to the stars?”

And so it was that Rincewind and Twoflower became the first two people on the Disc to see what the future held.

A thousand miles behind them the Hub mountain of Cori Celesti stabbed the sky and cast a knife-bright shadow across the broiling clouds, so that Gods ought to have noticed too—but the Gods don’t normally look at the sky and in any case were engaged in litigation with the Ice Giants, who had refused to turn their radio down.

Rimward, in the direction of Great A’Tuin’s travel, the sky had been swept of stars.

In that circle of blackness there was just one star, a red and baleful star, a star like the glitter in the eye socket of a rabid mink. It was small and horrible and uncompromising. And the Disc was being carried straight toward it.

Rincewind knew precisely what to do in these circumstances. He screamed and pointed the broomstick straight down.

Galder Weatherwax stood in the center of the octogram and raised his hands.

“Urshalo, dileptor, c’hula, do my bidding!”

A small mist formed over his head. He glanced sideways at Trymon, who was sulking at the edge of the magic circle.

“This next bit’s quite impressive,” he said. “Watch.
Kot-b’hai! Kot-sham!
To me, o spirits of small isolated rocks and worried mice not less than three inches long!”

“What?” said Trymon.

“That bit took quite a lot of research,” agreed Galder, “especially the mice. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes…”

He raised his arms again. Trymon watched him, and licked his lips distractedly. The old fool was really concentrating, bending his mind entirely to the Spell and hardly paying any attention to Trymon.

Words of power rolled around the room, bouncing off the walls and scuttling out of sight behind shelves and jars. Trymon hesitated.

Galder shut his eyes momentarily, his face a mask of ecstasy as he mouthed the final word.

Trymon tensed, his fingers curling around the knife again. And Galder opened one eye, nodded at him and sent a sideways blast of power that picked the younger man up and sent him sprawling against the wall.

Galder winked at him and raised his arms again.

“To me, o spirits of—”

There was a thunderclap, an implosion of light and a moment of complete physical uncertainty during which even the walls seemed to turn in on themselves. Trymon heard a sharp intake of breath and then a dull, solid thump:

The room was suddenly silent.

After a few minutes Trymon crawled out from behind a chair and dusted himself off. He whistled a few bars of nothing much and turned toward the door with exaggerated care, looking at the ceiling as if he had never seen it before. He moved in a way that suggested he was attempting the world speed record for the nonchalant walk.

The Luggage squatted in the center of the circle and opened its lid.

Trymon stopped. He turned very, very carefully, dreading what he might see.

The Luggage seemed to contain some clean laundry, smelling slightly of lavender. Somehow it was quite the most terrifying thing the wizard had ever seen.

“Well, er,” he said. “You, um, wouldn’t have seen another wizard around here, by any chance?”

The Luggage contrived to look more menacing.

“Oh,” said Trymon. “Well, fine. It doesn’t matter.”

He pulled vaguely at the hem of his robe and took a brief interest in the detail of its stitching. When he looked up the horrible box was still there.

“Goodbye,” he said, and ran. He managed to get through the door just in time.

The Disc’s little moon toiled across the sky. It shone by its own light, owing to the cramped and rather inefficient astronomical arrangements made by the Creator, and was quite crowded with assorted lunar goddesses who were not, at this particular time, paying much attention to what went on in the Disc but were getting up a petition about the Ice Giants.

Had they looked down, they would have seen Rincewind talking urgently to a bunch of rocks.

Trolls are one of the oldest life-forms in the multiverse, dating from an early attempt to get the whole life thing on the road without all that squashy protoplasm. Individual trolls live for a long time, hibernating during the summertime and sleeping during the day, since heat affects them and makes them slow. They have a fascinating geology. One could talk about tribology, one could mention the semiconductor effects of impure silicon, one could talk about the giant trolls of prehistory who make up most of the Disc’s major mountain ranges and will cause some real problems if they ever awake, but the plain fact is that without the Disc’s powerful and pervasive magical field trolls would have died out a long time ago.

Psychiatry hadn’t been invented on the Disc. No one had ever shoved an inkblot under Rincewind’s nose to see if he had any loose toys in the attic. So the only way he’d have been able to describe the rocks turning back into trolls was by gabbling vaguely about how pictures suddenly form when you look at the fire, or clouds.

One minute there’d be a perfectly ordinary rock, and suddenly a few cracks that had been there all along took on the definite appearance of a mouth or a pointed ear. A moment later, and without anything actually changing at all, a troll would be sitting there, grinning at him with a mouth full of diamonds.

They wouldn’t be able to digest me, he told himself. I’d make them awfully ill.

It wasn’t much of a comfort.

“So you’re Rincewind the wizard,” said the nearest one. It sounded like someone running over gravel. “I dunno. I thought you’d be taller.”

“Perhaps he’s eroded a bit,” said another one. “The legend is awfully old.”

Rincewind shifted awkwardly. He was pretty certain the rock he was sitting on was changing shape, and a tiny troll—hardly any more than a pebble—was sitting companionably on his foot and watching him with extreme interest.

“Legend?” he said. “What legend?”

“It’s been handed down from mountain to gravel since the sunset
*
of time,” said the first troll. “‘When the red star lights the sky Rincewind the wizard will come looking for onions. Do not bite him. It is very important that you help him stay alive.’”

There was a pause.

“That’s it?” said Rincewind.

“Yes,” said the troll. “We’ve always been puzzled about it. Most of our legends are much more exciting. It was more interesting being a rock in the old days.”

“It was?” said Rincewind weakly.

“Oh yes. No end of fun. Volcanoes all over the place. It really meant something, being a rock then. There was none of this sedimentary nonsense, you were igneous or nothing. Of course, that’s all gone now. People call themselves trolls today, well, sometimes they’re hardly more than slate. Chalk even. I wouldn’t give myself airs if you could use me to draw with, would you?”

“No,” said Rincewind quickly. “Absolutely not, no. This, er, this legend thing. It said you shouldn’t bite me?”

“That’s right!” said the little troll on his foot, “and it was me who told you where the onions were!”

“We’re rather glad you came along,” said the first troll, which Rincewind couldn’t help noticing was the biggest one there. “We’re a bit worried about this new star. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Rincewind. “Everyone seems to think I know about it, but I don’t—”

“It’s not that we would mind being melted down,” said the big troll. “That’s how we all started, anyway. But we thought, maybe, it might mean the end of everything and that doesn’t seem a very good thing.”

“It’s getting bigger,” said another troll. “Look at it now. Bigger than last night.”

Rincewind looked. It was
definitely
bigger than last night.

“So we thought you might have some suggestions?” said the head troll, as meekly as it is possible to sound with a voice like a granite gargle.

“You could jump over the Edge,” said Rincewind. “There must be lots of places in the universe that could do with some extra rocks.”

“We’ve heard about that,” said the troll. “We’ve met rocks that tried it. They say you float about for millions of years and then you get very hot and burn away and end up at the bottom of a big hole in the scenery. That doesn’t sound very bright.”

It stood up with a noise like coal rattling down a chute, and stretched its thick, knobbly arms.

“Well, we’re supposed to help you,” it said. “Anything you want doing?”

“I was supposed to be making some soup,” said Rincewind. He waved the onions vaguely. It was probably not the most heroic or purposeful gesture ever made.

“Soup?” said the troll. “Is that all?”

“Well, maybe some biscuits too.”

The trolls looked at one another, exposing enough mouth jewelry to buy a medium-sized city.

Eventually the biggest troll said, “Soup it is, then.” It shrugged grittily. “It’s just that we imagined that the legend would, well, be a little more—I don’t know, somehow I thought—still, I expect it doesn’t matter.”

It extended a hand like a bunch of fossil bananas.

“I’m Kwartz,” it said. “That’s Krysoprase over there, and Breccia, and Jasper, and my wife Beryl—she’s a bit metamorphic, but who isn’t these days? Jasper, get off his foot.”

Rincewind took the hand gingerly, bracing himself for the crunch of crushed bone. It didn’t come. The troll’s hand was rough and a bit lichenous around the fingernails.

“I’m sorry,” said Rincewind. “I never really met trolls before.”

“We’re a dying race,” said Kwartz sadly, as the party set off under the stars. “Young Jasper’s the only pebble in our tribe. We suffer from philosophy, you know.”

“Yes?” said Rincewind, trying to keep up. The troll band moved very quickly, but also very quietly, big round shapes moving like wraiths through the night. Only the occasional flat squeak of a night creature who hadn’t heard them approaching marked their passage.

“Oh, yes. Martyrs to it. It comes to all of us in the end. One evening, they say, you start to wake up and then you think ‘Why bother?’ and you just don’t. See those boulders over there?”

Rincewind saw some huge shapes lying in the grass.

“The one on the end’s my aunt. I don’t know what’s she’s thinking about, but she hasn’t moved for two hundred years.”

“Gosh, I’m sorry.”

“Oh, it’s no problem with us around to look after them,” said Kwartz. “Not many humans around here, you see. I know it’s not your fault, but you don’t seem to be able to spot the difference between a thinking troll and an ordinary rock. My great-uncle was actually quarried, you know.”

“That’s terrible!”

“Yes, one minute he was a troll, the next he was an ornamental fireplace.”

They paused in front of a familiar-looking cliff. The scuffed remains of a fire smoldered in the darkness.

“It looks like there’s been a fight,” said Beryl.

“They’re all gone!” said Rincewind. He ran to the end of the clearing. “The horses, too! Even the Luggage!”

“One of them’s leaked,” said Kwartz, kneeling down. “That red watery stuff you have in your insides. Look.”

“Blood!”

“Is that what it’s called? I’ve never really seen the point of it.”

Rincewind scuttled about in the manner of one totally at his wits’ end, peering behind bushes in case anyone was hiding there. That was why he tripped over a small green bottle.

“Cohen’s liniment!” he moaned. “He never goes anywhere without it!”

“Well,” said Kwartz, “you humans have something you can do, I mean like when we slow right down and catch philosophy, only you just fall to bits—”

“Dying, it’s called!” screamed Rincewind.

“That’s it. They haven’t done that, because they’re not here.”

“Unless they were eaten!” suggested Jasper excitedly.

“Hmm,” said Kwartz, and, “Wolves?” said Rincewind.

“We flattened all the wolves around here years ago,” said the troll. “Old Grandad did, anyway.”

“He didn’t like them?”

“No, he just didn’t used to look where he was going. Hmm.” The trolls looked at the ground again.

“There’s a trail,” he said. “Quite a lot of horses.” He looked up at the nearby hills, where sheer cliffs and dangerous crags loomed over the moonlit forests.

“Old Grandad lives up there,” he said quietly.

There was something about the way he said it that made Rincewind decide that he didn’t ever want to meet Old Grandad.

“Dangerous, is he?” he ventured.

“He’s very old and big and mean. We haven’t seen him about for years,” said Kwartz.

“Centuries,” corrected Beryl.

“He’ll squash them all flat!” added Jasper, jumping up and down on Rincewind’s toes.

“It just happens sometimes that a really old and big troll will go off by himself into the hills, and—um—the rock takes over, if you follow me.”

“No?”

Kwartz sighed. “People sometimes act like animals, don’t they? And sometimes a troll will start thinking like a rock, and rocks don’t like people much.”

Breccia, a skinny troll with a sandstone finish, rapped on Kwartz’s shoulder.

“Are we going to follow them, then?” he said. “The legend says we should help this Rincewind squashy.”

Kwartz stood up, thought for a moment, then picked Rincewind up by the scruff of his neck and with a big gritty movement placed him on his shoulders.

“We go,” he said firmly. “If we meet Old Grandad I’ll try to explain…”

Two miles away a string of horses trotted through the night. Three of them carried captives, expertly gagged and bound. A fourth pulled a rough travois on which the Luggage lay trussed and netted and silent.

Herrena softly called the column to a halt and beckoned one of her men to her.

“Are you quite sure?” she said. “I can’t hear anything.”

“I saw troll shapes,” he said flatly.

She looked around. The trees had thinned out here, there was a lot of scree, and ahead of them the track led toward a bald, rocky hill that looked especially unpleasant by red starlight.

She was worried about that track. It was extremely old, but something had made it, and trolls took a lot of killing.

She sighed. Suddenly it looked as though that secretarial career was not such a bad option, at that.

Not for the first time she reflected that there were many drawbacks to being a swordswoman, not least of which was that men didn’t take you seriously until you’d actually killed them, by which time it didn’t really matter anyway. Then there was all the leather, which brought her out in a rash but seemed to be unbreakably traditional. And then there was the ale. It was all right for the likes of Hrun the Barbarian or Cimbar the Assassin to carouse all night in low bars, but Herrena drew the line at it unless they sold proper drinks in small glasses, preferably with a cherry in. As for the toilet facilities…

But she was too big to be a thief, too honest to be an assassin, too intelligent to be a wife, and too proud to enter the only other female profession generally available.

So she’d become a swordswoman and had been a good one, amassing a modest fortune that she was carefully husbanding for a future that she hadn’t quite worked out yet but which would certainly include a bidet if she had anything to say about it.

There was a distant sound of splintering timber. Trolls had never seen the point of walking around trees.

She looked up at the hill again. Two arms of high ground swept away to right and left, and up ahead was a large outcrop with—she squinted—some caves in it?

Troll caves. But maybe a better option than blundering around at night. And come sunup, there’d be no problem.

She leaned across to Gancia, leader of the gang of Morpork mercenaries. She wasn’t very happy about him. It was true that he had the muscles of an ox and the stamina of an ox, the trouble was that he seemed to have the brains of an ox. And the viciousness of a ferret. Like most of the lads in downtown Morpork he’d have cheerfully sold his granny for glue, and probably had.

“We’ll head for the caves and light a big fire in the entrance,” she said. “Trolls don’t like fire.”

He gave her a look which suggested he had his own ideas about who should be giving the orders, but his lips said, “You’re the boss.”

“Right.”

Herrena looked back at the three captives. That was the box all right—Trymon’s description had been absolutely accurate. But neither of the men looked like a wizard. Not even a failed wizard.

“Oh, dear,” said Kwartz.

The trolls halted. The night closed in like velvet. An owl hooted eerily—at least Rincewind assumed it was an owl, he was a little hazy on ornithology. Perhaps a nightingale hooted, unless it was a thrush. A bat flittered overhead. He was quite confident about that.

He was also very tired and quite bruised.

“Why oh dear?” he said.

He peered into the gloom. There was a distant speck in the hills that might have been a fire.

“Oh,” he said. “You don’t like fires, do you?”

Kwartz nodded. “It destroys the superconductivity of our brains,” he said, “but a fire that small wouldn’t have much effect on Old Grandad.”

Rincewind looked around cautiously, listening for the sound of a rogue troll. He’d seen what normal trolls could do to a forest. They weren’t naturally destructive, they just treated organic matter as a sort of inconvenient fog.

“Let’s hope he doesn’t find it, then,” he said fervently.

Kwartz sighed. “Not much chance of that,” he said. “They’ve lit it in his mouth.”

“It’sh a judgeshment on me!” moaned Cohen. He tugged ineffectually at his bonds.

Twoflower peered at him muzzily. Gancia’s slingshot had raised quite a lump on the back of his head and he was a little uncertain about things, starting with his name and working upward.