‘Hi,’ it said eventually. ‘Are you a wizard?’
As a line of snake dialogue this was a considerable improvement on the normal string of esses, but Rincewind was sufficiently despondent not to waste time wondering and simply replied, ‘It’s on my hat, can’t you read?’
‘In seventeen languages, actually. I taught myself.’
‘Really?’
‘I sent off for courses. But I try not to read, of course. It’s not in character.’
‘I suppose it wouldn’t be.’ It was certainly the most cultured snake voice that Rincewind had ever heard.
‘It’s the same with the voice, I’m afraid,’ the snake added. ‘I shouldn’t really be talking to you now. Not like this, anyway. I suppose I could grunt a bit. I rather think I should be trying to kill you, in fact.’
‘I have curious and unusual powers,’ said Rincewind. Fair enough, he thought, an almost total inability to master any form of magic is pretty unusual for a wizard and anyway, it doesn’t matter about lying to a snake.
‘Gosh. Well, I expect you won’t be in here long, then.’
‘Hmm?’
‘I expect you’ll be levitating out of here like a shot, any minute.’
Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.
‘I might,’ he said cautiously.
‘In that case, you wouldn’t mind taking me with you, would you?’
‘Eh?’
‘It’s a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it’s the pits.’
‘Take you? But you’re a snake, it’s your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things.’
A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.
‘That’s a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone,’ it said.
The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.
It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.
To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word ‘emaciated’. He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.
Rincewind looked again.
He had been right the first time.
The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes - a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, youd see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you’d never see another one wearing -
The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.
‘I can’t help it,’ he said. ‘I promised my mother.’
‘Woolly underwear?’
Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city’s astronomers, but that wasn’t the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn’t the strangest thing.
The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.