The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one God, craned forward to peer at them.
“A wenegad wiffard and tome fort of clerk,” said Offler the Crocodile God, hindered as usual by his tusks. “Well, weally! ” With one claw he pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the centre of the table.
The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dicecup and held it as steady as a rock, yet all the Gods could hear the three cubes rattling about inside.
And then She sent them bouncing across the table.
A six. A three. A five.
Something was happening to the five, however.
Battered by the chance collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun gently and came down a seven.
Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides. “Come on,” he said wearily, “play fair.”
2. The Sending of Eight
The road from Ankh-Morpork to Quirm is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard (Being Unseen University failed.) It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant -he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word -that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant “idiot”.
As they rode leisurely through the thyme-scented bee-humming air, Rincewind pondered on the experiences of the last few days. While the little foreigner was obviously insane, he was also generous and considerably less lethal than half the people the wizard had mixed with in the city-Rincewind rather liked him. Disliking him would have been like kicking a puppy.
Currently Twoflower was showing a great interest in the theory and practice of magic.
“It all seems, well, rather useless to me,” he said. “I always thought that, you know, a wizard just said the magic words and that was that. Not all this tedious memorising.”
Rincewind agreed moodily. He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears.
He went on to add that some of the ancient magic could still be found in its raw state, recognisable- to the initiated - by the eightfold shape it made in the crystalline structure of space-time. There was the metal octiron, for example, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous amounts of raw enchantment.
“It’s all very depressing,” he finished.
“Depressing?”
Rincewind turned in his saddle and glanced at Twoflower’s Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs, occasionally snapping its lid at butterflies. He sighed.
“Rincewind thinks he ought to be able to harness the lightning,” said the picture-imp, who was observing the passing scene from the tiny doorway of the box slung around Twoflower’s neck. He had spent the morning painting picturesque views and quaint scenes for his master, and had been allowed to knock off for a smoke.
“When I said harness I didn’t mean harness, snapped Rincewind. “I meant, well I just meant that -I dunno, I just can’t think of the right words. I just think the world ought to be more sort of organised.”
“That’s just fantasy,” said Twoflower.
“I know. That’s the trouble.” Rincewind sighed again. It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going round to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.
There was a faint sound, hardly louder than the noise of the bees in the rosemary by the road. It had a curiously bony quality, as of rolling skulls or a whirling dicebox. Rincewind peered around. There was no-one nearby.
For some reason that worried him.
Then came a slight breeze, that grew and went in the space of a few heartbeats. It left the world unchanged save in a few interesting particulars. There was now, for example, a five-metre tall mountain troll standing in the road. It was exceptionally angry. This was partly because trolls generally are, in any case, but it was exacerbated by the fact that the sudden and instantaneous teleportation from its lair in the Rammerorck Mountains three thousand miles away and a thousand yards closer to the Rim had raised its internal temperature to a dangerous level, in accordance with the laws of conservation of energy. So it bared its fangs and charged.
easel stood up and stretched. The sun was well up now, and the city below them was wreathed in mists and full of foul vapours. Also gold, he decided. Even a citizen of Morpork would, at the very point of death, desert his treasure to save his skin. Time to move.
The little man called Twoflower appeared to be asleep. The Weasel looked down at him and shook his head.
“The city awaits, such as it is,” he said. “Thank you for a pleasant tale, Wizard. What will you do now?”
He eyed the Luggage, which immediately backed away and snapped its lid at him.