The Colour of Magic Read online

  “What happened next?” said Twoflower breathlessly, glancing toward the misty universe.

  “I froze solid,” said Tethis simply. “Fortunately it is something my race can survive. But I thawed out occasionally when I passed near other worlds. There was one, I think it was the one with what I thought was this strange ring of mountains around it that turned out to be the biggest dragon you could ever imagine, covered in snow and glaciers and holding its tail in its mouth—well, I came within a few leagues of that, I shot over the landscape like a comet, in fact, and then I was off again. Then there was a time I woke up and there was your world coming at me like a custard piethrown by the Creator and, well, I landed in the sea not far from the Circumfence widdershins of Krull. All sorts of creatures get washed up against the Fence, and at the time they were looking for slaves to man the way stations, and I ended up here.” He stopped and stared intently at Rincewind. “Every night I come out here and look down,” he finished, “and I never jump. Courage is hard to come by, here on the Edge.”

  Rincewind began to crawl determinedly toward the shack. He gave a little scream as the troll picked him up, not unkindly, and set him on his feet.

  “Amazing,” said Twoflower, and leaned farther out over the Edge. “There are lots of other worlds out there?”

  “Quite a number, I imagine,” said the troll.

  “I suppose one could contrive some sort of, I don’t know, some sort of a thing that could preserve one against the cold,” said the little man thoughtfully. “Some sort of a ship that one could sail over the Edge and sail to far-off worlds, too. I wonder…”

  “Don’t even think about it!” moaned Rincewind. “Stop talking like that, do you hear?”

  “They all talk like that in Krull,” said Tethis.

  “Those with tongues, of course,” he added.

  “Are you awake?”

  Twoflower snored on. Rincewind jabbed him viciously in the ribs.

  “I said, are you awake?” he snarled.

  “Scrdfngh…”

  “We’ve got to get out of here before this salvage fleet comes!”

  The dishwater light of dawn oozed through the shack’s one window, slopping across the piles of salvaged boxes and bundles that were strewn around the interior. Twoflower grunted again and tried to burrow into the pile of furs and blankets that Tethis had given them.

  “Look, there’s all kinds of weapons and stuff in here,” said Rincewind. “He’s gone out somewhere. When he comes back we could overpower him and—and—well, then we can think of something. How about it?”

  “That doesn’t sound like a very good idea,” said Twoflower. “Anyhow, it’s a bit ungracious isn’t it?”

  “Tough buns,” snapped Rincewind. “This is a rough universe.”

  He rummaged through the piles around the walls and selected a heavy, wavy-bladed scimitar that had probably been some pirate’s pride and joy. It looked the sort of weapon that relied as much on its weight as its edge to cause damage. He raised it awkwardly.

  “Would he leave that sort of thing around if it could hurt him?” Twoflower wondered aloud.

  Rincewind ignored him and took up a position beside the door. When it opened some ten minutes later he moved unhesitatingly, swinging it across the opening at what he judged was the troll’s head height. It swished harmlessly through nothing at all and struck the doorpost, jerking him off his feet and onto the floor.

  There was a sigh above him. He looked up into Tethis’s face, which was shaking sadly from side to side.

  “It wouldn’t have harmed me,” said the troll, “but nevertheless I am hurt. Deeply hurt.” He reached over the wizard and jerked the sword out of the wood. With no apparent effort he bent its blade into a circle and sent it bowling away over the rocks until it hit a stone and sprang, still spinning, in a silver arc that ended in the mists forming over the Rimfall.

  “Very deeply hurt,” he concluded. He reached down beside the door and tossed a sack toward Twoflower.

  “It’s the carcass of a deer that is just about how you humans like it, and a few lobsters, and a sea salmon. The Circumfence provides,” he said casually.

  He looked hard at the tourist, and then down again at Rincewind.

  “What are you staring at?” he said.

  “It’s just that—” said Twoflower.

  “—compared to last night—” said Rincewind.

  “You’re so small,” finished Twoflower.

  “I see, said the troll carefully. “Personal remarks now.” He drew himself up to his full height, which was currently about four feet. “Just because I’m made of water doesn’t mean I’m made of wood, you know.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Twoflower, climbing hastily out of the furs.

  “You’re made of dirt,” said the troll, “but I didn’t pass comments about things you can’t help, did I? Oh, no. We can’t help the way the Creator made us, that’s my view. But if you must know, your moon here is rather more powerful than the ones around my own world.”

  “The moon?” said Twoflower. “I don’t under—”

  “If I’ve got to spell it out,” said the troll, testily, “I’m suffering from chronic tides.”

  A bell jangled in the darkness of the shack. Tethis strode across the creaking floor to the complicated devices of levers, strings and bells that was mounted on the Circumfence’s topmost strand where it passed through the hut.

  The bell rang again, and then started to clang away in an odd jerky rhythm for several minutes. The troll stood with his ear pressed close to it.

  When it stopped he turned slowly and looked at them with a worried frown.

  “You’re more important than I thought,” he said. “You’re not to wait for the salvage fleet. You’re to be collected by a flyer. That’s what they say in Krull.” He shrugged. “And I hadn’t even sent a message that you’re here, yet. Someone’s been drinking vul nut wine again.”

  He picked up a large mallet that hung on a pillar beside the bell and used it to tap out a brief carillon.

  “That’ll be passed from lengthman to lengthman all the way back to Krull,” he said. “Marvelous really, isn’t it?”

  It came speeding across the sea, floating a man-length above it, but still leaving a foaming wake as whatever power that held it up smacked brutally into the water. Rincewind knew what power held it up. He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure; but he was still a wizard of sorts, he knew one of the Eight Great Spells, he would be claimed by Death himself when he died, and he recognized really finely honed magic when he saw it.

  The lens skimming toward the island was perhaps twenty feet across, and totally transparent. Sitting around its circumference were a large number of black-robed men, each one strapped securely to the Disc by a leather harness and each one staring down at the waves with an expression so tormented, so agonizing, that the transparent disc seemed to be ringed with gargoyles.

  Rincewind sighed with relief. This was such an unusual sound that it made Twoflower take his eyes off the approaching disc and turn them on him.

  “We’re important, no lie,” explained Rincewind. “They wouldn’t be wasting all that magic on a couple of potential slaves.” He grinned.

  “What is it?” said Twoflower.

  “Well, the disc itself would have been created by Fresnel’s Wonderful Concentrator,” said Rincewind, authoritatively. “That calls for many rare and unstable ingredients, such as demon’s breath and so forth, and it takes at least eight fourth-grade wizards a week to envision. Then there’s those wizards on it, who must all be gifted hydrophobes—”

  “You mean they hate water?” said Twoflower.

  “No, that wouldn’t work,” said Rincewind. “Hate is an attracting force, just like love. They really loathe it, the very idea of it revolts them. A really good hydrophobe has to be trained on dehydrated water from birth. I mean, that costs a fortune in magic alone. But they make great w
eather magicians. Rain clouds just give up and go away.”

  “It sounds terrible,” said the water troll behind them.

  “And they all die young,” said Rincewind, ignoring him. “They just can’t live with themselves.”

  “Sometimes I think a man could wander across the Disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,” said Twoflower. “And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,” he paused, then added, “well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.”

  The flyer halted a few yards hubward of the island, throwing up a sheet of spray. It hung there, spinning slowly. A hooded figure standing by the stubby pillar at the exact center of the lens beckoned to them.

  “You’d better wade out,” said the troll. “It doesn’t do to keep them waiting. It has been nice to make your acquaintance.” He shook them both, wetly, by the hand. As he waded out a little way with them the two nearest loathers on the lens shied away with expressions of extreme disgust.

  The hooded figure reached down with one hand and released a rope ladder. In its other hand it held a silver rod, which had about it the unmistakable air of something designed for killing people. Rincewind’s first impression was reinforced when the figure raised the stick and waved it carelessly toward the shore. A section of rock vanished, leaving a small gray haze of nothingness.

  “That’s so you don’t think I’m afraid to use it,” said the figure.

  “Don’t think you’re afraid?” said Rincewind. The hooded figure snorted.

  “We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.”

  It fooled Rincewind. “I—” he began, and paled as the nothingness-stick was turned toward him. “I see you know all about me,” he finished weakly, and sat down heavily on the slippery surface. He and Twoflower, under instructions from the hooded commander, strapped themselves down to rings set in the transparent disc.

  “If you make the merest suggestion of weaving a spell,” said the darkness under the hood, “you die. Third quadrant reconcile, ninth quadrant redouble, forward all!”

  A wall of water shot into the air behind Rincewind and the disc jerked suddenly. The dreadful presence of the sea troll had probably concentrated the hydrophobes’ minds wonderfully, because it then rose at a very steep angle and didn’t begin level flight until it was a dozen fathoms above the waves. Rincewind glanced down through the transparent surface and wished he hadn’t.

  “Well, off again then,” said Twoflower cheerfully. He turned and waved at the troll, now no more than a speck on the edge of the world.

  Rincewind glared at him. “Doesn’t anything every worry you?” he asked.

  “We’re still alive, aren’t we?” asked Twoflower. “And you yourself said they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble if we were just going to be slaves. I expect Tethis was exaggerating. I expect it’s all a misunderstanding. I expect we’ll be sent home. After we’ve seen Krull, of course. And I must say it all sounds fascinating.”

  “Oh yes,” said Rincewind, in a hollow voice. “Fascinating.” He was thinking: I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best.

  Had either of them happened to look down at that moment they would have noticed a strange v-shaped wave surging through the water far below them, its apex pointing directly at Tethis’s island. But they weren’t looking. The twenty-four hydrophobic magicians were looking, but to them it was just another piece of dreadfulness, not really any different from the liquid horror around it. They were probably right.

  Sometime before all this the blazing pirate ship had hissed under the waves and started the long slow slide toward the distant ooze. It was more distant than average, because directly under the stricken keel was the Gorunna Trench—a chasm in the Disc’s surface that was so black, so deep and so reputedly evil that even the krakens went there fearfully, and in pairs. In less reputedly evil chasms the fish went about with natural lights on their heads and on the whole managed quite well. In Gorunna they left them unlit and, insofar as it is possible for something without legs to creep, they crept; they tended to bump into things, too. Horrible things.

  The water around the ship turned from green to purple, from purple to black, from black to a darkness so complete that blackness itself seemed merely gray by comparison. Most of its timbers had already been crushed into splinters under the intense pressure.

  It spiraled past groves of nightmare polyps and drifting forests of seaweed which glowed with faint, diseased colors. Things brushed it briefly with soft, cold tentacles as they darted away into the freezing silence.

  Something rose up from the murk and ate it in one mouthful.

  Some time later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to have been trampled to death.

  Somewhat farther rimward of the atoll a couple of little boats, trolling a net for the ferocious free-swimming oysters which abounded in those seas, caught something that dragged both vessels for several miles before one captain had the presence of mind to sever the lines.

  But even his bewilderment was as nothing compared to that of the islanders on the last atoll in the archipelago. During the following night they were awakened by a terrific crashing and splintering noise coming from their minute jungle; when some of the bolder spirits went to investigate in the morning they found that the trees had been smashed in a broad swath that started on the hubmost shore of the atoll and made a line of total destruction pointing precisely Edgewise, littered with broken lianas, crushed bushes and a few bewildered and angry oysters.

  They were high enough now to see the wide curve of the Rim sweeping away from them, lapped by the fluffy clouds that mercifully hid the waterfall for most of the time. From up here the sea, a deep blue dappled with cloud-shadows, looked almost inviting. Rincewind shuddered.

  “Excuse me,” he said. The hooded figure turned from its contemplation of the distant haze and raised its wand threateningly.

  “I don’t want to use this,” it said.

  “You don’t?” said Rincewind.

  “What is it, anyway?” said Twoflower.

  “Ajandurah’s Wand of Utter Negativity,” said Rincewind. “And I wish you’d stop waving it about. It might go off,” he added, nodding at the wand’s glittering point. “I mean, it’s all very flattering, all this magic being used just for our benefit, but there’s no need to go quite that far. And—”

  “Shut up. The figure reached up and pulled back its hood, revealing itself to be a most unusually tinted young woman. Her skin was black. Not the dark brown of Urabewe, or the polished blue-black of monsoon-haunted Klatch, but the deep black of midnight at the bottom of a cave. Her hair and eyebrows were the color of moonlight. There was the same pale sheen around her lips. She looked about fifteen, and very frightened.

  Rincewind couldn’t help noticing that the hand holding the wand was shaking; this was because a piece of sudden death, wobbling uncertainly a mere five feet from your nose, is very hard to miss. It dawned on him—very slowly, because it was a completely new sensation—that someone in the world was frightened of him. The complete reverse was so often the case that he had come to think of it as a kind of natural law.

  “What is your name?” he said, as reassuringly as he could manage. She might be frightened, but she did have the wand. If I had a wand like that, he thought, I wouldn’t be frightened of anything. So what in Creation can she imagine I could do?

  “My name is immaterial,” she said.

  “That’s a pretty name,” said Rin
cewind. “Where are you taking us, and why? I can’t see any harm in your telling us.”

  “You are being brought to Krull,” said the girl. “And don’t mock me, Hublander. Else I’ll use the wand. I must bring you in alive, but no one said anything about bringing you in whole. My name is Marchesa, and I am a wizard of the fifth level. Do you understand?”

  “Well, since you know all about me then you know that I never even made it to Neophyte,” said Rincewind. “I’m not even a wizard, really.” He caught Twoflower’s astonished expression, and added hastily, “Just a wizard of sorts.”

  “You can’t do magic because one of the Eight Great Spells is indelibly lodged in your mind,” said Marchesa, shifting her balance gracefully as the great lens described a wide arc over the sea. “That’s why you were thrown out of Unseen University. We know.”

  “But you said just now that he was a magician of great cunning and artifice,” protested Twoflower.

  “Yes, because anyone who survives all that he has survived—most of which was brought on himself by his tendency to think of himself as a wizard—well, he must be some kind of a magician,” said Marchesa. “I warn you, Rincewind. If you give me the merest suspicion that you are intoning the Great Spell I really will kill you.” She scowled at him nervously.

  “Seems to me your best course would be to just, you know, drop us off somewhere,” said Rincewind. “I mean, thanks for rescuing us and everything, so if you’d just let us get on with leading our lives I’m sure we’d all—”

  “I hope you’re not proposing to enslave us,” said Twoflower.

  Marchesa looked genuinely shocked. “Certainly not! Whatever could have given you that idea? Your lives in Krull will be rich, full and comfortable—”

  “Oh, good,” said Rincewind.

  “—just not very long.”

  Krull turned out to be a large island, quite mountainous and heavily wooded, with pleasant white buildings visible here and there among the trees. The land sloped gradually up toward the Rim, so that the highest point in Krull in fact slightly overhung the Edge. Here the Krullians had built their major city, also called Krull, and since so much of their building material had been salvaged from the Circumfence the houses of Krull had a decidedly nautical persuasion.