Discworld 05 - Sourcery Read online

  “Then all truly wise men would prefer the safety of a nice deep dungeon,” said the Patrician. “And now you will cease this foolery and replace me in my palace, and it is just possible that we will say no more about this. Or at least that you won’t have the chance to.”

  Wuffles gave up investigating Carding’s boots and trotted toward Coin, shedding a few hairs on the way.

  “This pantomime has gone on long enough,” said the Patrician. “Now I am getting—”

  Wuffles growled. It was a deep, primeval noise, which struck a chord in the racial memory of all those present and filled them with an urgent desire to climb a tree. It suggested long gray shapes hunting in the dawn of time. It was astonishing that such a small animal could contain so much menace, and all of it was aimed at the staff in Coin’s hand.

  The Patrician strode forward to snatch the animal, and Carding raised his hand and sent a blaze of orange and blue fire searing across the room.

  The Patrician vanished. On the spot where he had been standing a small yellow lizard blinked and glared with malevolent reptilian stupidity.

  Carding looked in astonishment at his fingers, as if for the first time.

  “All right,” he whispered hoarsely.

  The wizards stared down at the panting lizard, and then out at the city sparkling in the early morning light. Out there was the council of aldermen, the city watch, the Guild of Thieves, the Guild of Merchants, the priesthoods…and none of them knew what was about to hit them.

  It has begun, said the hat, from its box on the deck.

  “What has?” said Rincewind.

  The rule of sourcery.

  Rincewind looked blank. “Is that good?”

  Do you ever understand anything anyone says to you?

  Rincewind felt on firmer ground here. “No,” he said. “Not always. Not lately. Not often.”

  “Are you sure you are a wizard?” said Conina.

  “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been sure of,” he said, with conviction.

  “How strange.”

  Rincewind sat on the Luggage in the sun on the foredeck of the Ocean Waltzer as it lurched peacefully across the green waters of the Circle Sea. Around them men did what he was sure were important nautical things, and he hoped they were doing them correctly, because next to heights he hated depths most of all.

  “You look worried,” said Conina, who was cutting his hair. Rincewind tried to make his head as small as possible as the blades flashed by.

  “That’s because I am.”

  “What exactly is the Apocralypse?”

  Rincewind hesitated. “Well,” he said, “it’s the end of the world. Sort of.”

  “Sort of? Sort of the end of the world? You mean we won’t be certain? We’ll look around and say ‘Pardon me, did you hear something?’?”

  “It’s just that no two seers have ever agreed about it. There have been all kinds of vague predictions. Quite mad, some of them. So it was called the Apocralypse.” He looked embarrassed. “It’s a sort of apocryphal Apocalypse. A kind of pun, you see.”

  “Not very good.”

  “No. I suppose not.”*

  Conina’s scissors snipped busily.

  “I must say the captain seemed quite happy to have us aboard,” she observed.

  “That’s because they think it’s lucky to have a wizard on the boat,” said Rincewind. “It isn’t, of course.”

  “Lots of people believe it,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s lucky for other people, just not for me. I can’t swim.”

  “What, not a stroke?”

  Rincewind hesitated, and twiddled the star on his hat cautiously.

  “About how deep is the sea here, would you say? Approximately?” he said.

  “About a dozen fathoms, I believe.”

  “Then I could probably swim about a dozen fathoms, whatever they are.”

  “Stop trembling like that, I nearly had your ear off,” Conina snapped. She glared at a passing seaman and waved her scissors. “What’s the matter, you never saw a man have a haircut before?”

  Someone up in the rigging made a remark which caused a ripple of ribald laughter in the topgallants, unless they were forecastles.

  “I shall pretend I didn’t hear that,” said Conina, and gave the comb a savage yank, dislodging numerous inoffensive small creatures.

  “Ow!”

  “Well, you should keep still!”

  “It’s a little difficult to keep still knowing who it is that’s waving a couple of steel blades around my head!”

  And so the morning passed, with scudding wavelets, the creaking of the rigging, and a rather complex layer cut. Rincewind had to admit, looking at himself in a shard of mirror, that there was a definite improvement.

  The captain had said that they were bound for the city of Al Khali, on the hubward coast of Klatch.

  “Like Ankh, only with sand instead of mud,” said Rincewind, leaning over the rail. “But quite a good slave market.”

  “Slavery is immoral,” said Conina firmly.

  “Is it? Gosh,” said Rincewind.

  “Would you like me to trim your beard?” said Conina, hopefully.

  She stopped, scissors drawn, and stared out to sea.

  “Is there a kind of sailor that uses a canoe with sort of extra bits on the side and a sort of red eye painted on the front and a small sail?” she said.

  “I’ve heard of Klatchian slave pirates,” said Rincewind, “but this is a big boat. I shouldn’t think one of them would dare attack it.”

  “One of them wouldn’t,” said Conina, still staring at the fuzzy area where the sea became the sky, “but these five might.”

  Rincewind peered at the distant haze, and then looked up at the man on watch, who shook his head.

  “Come on,” he chuckled, with all the humor of a blocked drain. “You can’t really see anything out there. Can you?”

  “Ten men in each canoe,” said Conina grimly.

  “Look, a joke’s a joke—”

  “With long curvy swords.”

  “Well, I can’t see a—”

  “—their long and rather dirty hair blowing in the wind—”

  “With split ends, I expect?” said Rincewind sourly.

  “Are you trying to be funny?”

  “Me?”

  “And here’s me without a weapon,” said Conina, sweeping back across the deck. “I bet there isn’t a decent sword anywhere on this boat.”

  “Never mind. Perhaps they’ve just come for a quick shampoo.”

  While Conina rummaged frantically in her pack Rincewind sidled over to the Archchancellor’s hatbox and cautiously raised the lid.

  “There’s nothing out there, is there?” he asked.

  How should I know? Put me on.

  “What? On my head?”

  Good grief.

  “But I’m not an Archchancellor!” said Rincewind. “I mean, I’ve heard of cool-headed, but—”

  I need to use your eyes. Now put me on. On your head.

  “Um.”

  Trust me.

  Rincewind couldn’t disobey. He gingerly removed his battered gray hat, looked longingly at its disheveled star, and lifted the Archchancellor’s hat out of its box. It felt rather heavier than he’d expected. The octarines around the crown were glowing faintly.

  He lowered it carefully onto his new hairstyle, clutching the brim tightly in case he felt the first icy chill.

  In fact he simply felt incredibly light. And there was a feeling of great knowledge and power—not actually present, but just, mentally speaking, on the tip of his metaphorical tongue.

  Odd scraps of memory flickered across his mind, and they weren’t any memories he remembered remembering before. He probed gently, as one touches a hollow tooth with the tongue, and there they were—

  Two hundred dead Archchancellors, dwindling into the leaden, freezing past, one behind the other, watched him with blank gray eyes.

  That’s why it’s so
cold, he told himself, the warmth seeps into the dead world. Oh, no…

  When the hat spoke, he saw two hundred pairs of pale lips move.

  Who are you?

  Rincewind, thought Rincewind. And in the inner recesses of his head he tried to think privately to himself…help.

  He felt his knees begin to buckle under the weight of centuries.

  What’s it like, being dead? he thought.

  Death is but a sleep, said the dead mages.

  But what does it feel like? Rincewind thought.

  You will have an unrivalled chance to find out when those war canoes get here, Rincewind.

  With a yelp of terror he thrust upwards and forced the hat off his head. Real life and sound flooded back in, but since someone was frantically banging a gong very close to his ear this was not much of an improvement. The canoes were visible to everyone now, cutting through the water with an eerie silence. Those black-clad figures manning the paddles should have been whooping and screaming; it wouldn’t have made it any better, but it would have seemed more appropriate. The silence bespoke an unpleasant air of purpose.

  “Gods, that was awful,” he said. “Mind you, so is this.”

  Crew members scurried across the deck, cutlasses in hand. Conina tapped Rincewind on the shoulder.

  “They’ll try to take us alive,” she said.

  “Oh,” said Rincewind weakly. “Good.”

  Then he remembered something else about Klatchian slavers, and his throat went dry.

  “You’ll—you’ll be the one they’ll be after,” he said. “I’ve heard about what they do—”

  “Should I know?” said Conina. To Rincewind’s horror she didn’t appear to have found a weapon.

  “They’ll throw you in a seraglio!”

  She shrugged. “Could be worse.”

  “But it’s got all these spikes and when they shut the door—” hazarded Rincewind. The canoes were close enough now to see the determined expressions of the rowers.

  “That’s not a seraglio. That’s an Iron Maiden. Don’t you know what a seraglio is?”

  “Um…”

  She told him. He went crimson.

  “Anyway, they’ll have to capture me first,” said Conina primly. “It’s you who should be worrying.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re the only other one who’s wearing a dress.”

  Rincewind bridled. “It’s a robe—”

  “Robe, dress. You better hope they know the difference.”

  A hand like a bunch of bananas with rings on grabbed Rincewind’s shoulder and spun him around. The captain, a Hublander built on generous bear-like lines, beamed at him through a mass of facial hair.

  “Hah!” he said. “They know not that we aboard a wizard have! To create in their bellies the burning green fire! Hah?”

  The dark forests of his eyebrows wrinkled as it became apparent that Rincewind wasn’t immediately ready to hurl vengeful magic at the invaders.

  “Hah?” he insisted, making a mere single syllable do the work of a whole string of blood-congealing threats.

  “Yes, well, I’m just—I’m just girding my loins,” said Rincewind. “That’s what I’m doing. Girding them. Green fire, you want?”

  “Also to make hot lead run in their bones,” said the captain. “Also their skins to blister and living scorpions without mercy to eat their brains from inside, and—”

  The leading canoe came alongside and a couple of grapnels thudded into the rail. As the first of the slavers appeared the captain hurried away, drawing his sword. He stopped for a moment and turned to Rincewind.

  “You gird quickly,” he said. “Or no loins. Hah?”

  Rincewind turned to Conina, who was leaning on the rail examining her fingernails.

  “You’d better get on with it,” she said. “That’s fifty green fires and hot leads to go, with a side order for blisters and scorpions. Hold the mercy.”

  “This sort of thing is always happening to me,” he moaned.

  He peered over the rail to what he thought of as the main floor of the boat. The invaders were winning by sheer weight of numbers, using nets and ropes to tangle the struggling crew. They worked in absolute silence, clubbing and dodging, avoiding the use of swords wherever possible.

  “Musn’t damage the merchandise,” said Conina. Rincewind watched in horror as the captain went down under a press of dark shapes, screaming, “Green fire! Green fire!”

  Rincewind backed away. He wasn’t any good at magic, but he’d had a hundred percent success at staying alive up to now and didn’t want to spoil the record. All he needed to do was to learn how to swim in the time it took to dive into the sea. It was worth a try.

  “What are you waiting for? Let’s go while they’re occupied,” he said to Conina.

  “I need a sword,” she said.

  “You’ll be spoiled for choice in a minute.”

  “One will be enough.”

  Rincewind kicked the Luggage.

  “Come on,” he snarled. “You’ve got a lot of floating to do.”

  The Luggage extended its little legs with exaggerated nonchalance, turned slowly, and settled down beside the girl.

  “Traitor,” said Rincewind to its hinges.

  The battle already seemed to be over. Five of the raiders stalked up the ladder to the afterdeck, leaving most of their colleagues to round up the defeated crew below. The leader pulled down his mask and leered briefly and swarthily at Conina; and then he turned and leered for a slightly longer period at Rincewind.

  “This is a robe,” said Rincewind quickly. “And you’d better watch out, because I’m a wizard.” He took a deep breath. “Lay a finger on me, and you’ll make me wish you hadn’t. I warn you.”

  “A wizard? Wizards don’t make good strong slaves,” mused the leader.

  “Absolutely right,” said Rincewind. “So if you’ll just see your way clear to letting me go—”

  The leader turned back to Conina and signaled to one of his companions. He jerked a tattooed thumb toward Rincewind.

  “Do not kill him too quickly. In fact—” He paused, and treated Rincewind to a smile full of teeth. “Maybe…yes. And why not? Can you sing, wizard?”

  “I might be able to,” said Rincewind, cautiously. “Why?”

  “You could be just the man the Seriph needs for a job in the harem.” A couple of slavers sniggered.

  “It could be a unique opportunity,” the leader went on, encouraged by this audience appreciation. There was more broadminded approval from behind him.

  Rincewind backed away. “I don’t think so,” he said, “thanks all the same. I’m not cut out for that kind of thing.”

  “Oh, but you could be,” said the leader, his eyes bright. “You could be.”

  “Oh, for goodness sake,” muttered Conina. She glanced at the men on either side of her, and then her hands moved. The one stabbed with the scissors was possibly better off than the one she raked with the comb, given the kind of mess a steel comb can make of a face. Then she reached down, snatched up a sword dropped by one of the stricken men, and lunged at the other two.

  The leader turned at the screams, and saw the Luggage behind him with its lid open. And then Rincewind cannoned into the back of him, pitching him forward into whatever oblivion lay in the multidimensional depths of the chest.

  There was the start of a bellow, abruptly cut off.

  Then there was a click like the shooting of the bolt on the gates of Hell.

  Rincewind backed away, trembling. “A unique opportunity,” he muttered under his breath, having just got the reference.

  At least he had a unique opportunity to watch Conina fight. Not many men ever got to see it twice.

  Her opponents started off grinning at the temerity of a slight young girl in attacking them, and then rapidly passed through various stages of puzzlement, doubt, concern and abject gibbeting terror as they apparently became the center of a flashing, tightening circle of steel.

&nbs
p; She disposed of the last of the leader’s bodyguard with a couple of thrusts that made Rincewind’s eyes water and, with a sigh, vaulted the rail on the main deck. To Rincewind’s annoyance the Luggage barrelled after her, cushioning its fall by dropping heavily onto a slaver, and adding to the sudden panic of the invaders because, while it was bad enough to be attacked with deadly and ferocious accuracy by a rather pretty girl in a white dress with flowers on it, it was even worse for the male ego to be tripped up and bitten by a travel accessory; it was pretty bad for all the rest of the male, too.

  Rincewind peered over the railing.

  “Showoff,” he muttered.

  A throwing knife clipped the wood near his chin and ricocheted past his ear. He raised his hand to the sudden stinging pain, and stared at it in horror before gently passing out. It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting.

  The market in Sator Square, the wide expanse of cobbles outside the black gates of the University, was in full cry.

  It was said that everything in Ankh-Morpork was for sale except for the beer and the women, both of which one merely hired. And most of the merchandise was available in Sator market, which over the years had grown, stall by stall, until the newcomers were up against the ancient stones of the University itself; in fact they made a handy display area for bolts of cloth and racks of charms.

  No one noticed the gates swing back. But a silence rolled out of the University, spreading out across the noisy, crowded square like the first fresh wavelets of the tide trickling over a brackish swamp. In fact it wasn’t true silence at all, but a great roar of anti-noise. Silence isn’t the opposite of sound, it is merely its absence. But this was the sound that lies on the far side of silence, anti-noise, its shadowy decibels throttling the market cries like a fall of velvet.

  The crowds stared around wildly, mouthing like goldfish and with about as much effect. All heads turned toward the gates.

  Something else was flowing out besides that cacophony of hush. The stalls nearest the empty gateway began to grind across the cobbles, shedding merchandise. Their owners dived out of the way as the stalls hit the row behind them and scraped relentlessly onward, piling up until a wide avenue of clean, empty stones stretched the whole width of the square.