After a few false starts it walked to the top of a nearby sand dune, which gave it an unrivalled view of hundreds of other dunes. >‘All right, what did you see?’
‘Well, I’m not exactly-’
‘You don’t know, do you?’ snapped Sconner.
‘I saw someth-’
‘You don’t know!’ repeated Sconner, ‘You’re just seeing shadows, just trying to undermine my authority, isn’t that it?’ Sconner hesitated, and his eyes glazed momentarily. ‘I am calm,’ he intoned, ‘I am totally in control. I will not let ‘
‘It was-’
‘Listen, shortarse, you can just jolly well shut up, all right?’
One of the other wizards, who had been staring upwards to conceal his embarrassment, gave a strangled little cough.
‘Er, Sconner-’
‘And that goes for you too!’ Sconner pulled himself to his full, bristling height and flourished the matches.
‘As I was saying,’ he said, ‘I want you to light the matches and -I suppose I’ll have to show you how to light matches, for the benefit of shortarse there-and I’m not out of the window, you know. Good grief. Look at me. You take a match-’
He lit a match, the darkness blossomed into a ball of sulphurous white light, and the Librarian dropped on him like the descent of Man.
They all knew the Librarian, in the same definite but diffused way that people know walls and floors and all the other minor but necessary scenery on the stage of life. If they recall him at all, it was as a sort of gentle mobile sigh, sitting under his desk repairing books, or knuckling his way among the shelves in search of secret smokers. Any wizard unwise enough to hazard a clandestine rollup wouldn’t know anything about it until a soft leathery hand reached up and removed the offending homemade, but the Librarian never made a fuss, he just looked extremely hurt and sorrowful about the whole sad business and then ate it.
Whereas what was now attempting with considerable effort to unscrew Sconner’s head by the ears was a screaming nightmare with its lips curled back to reveal long yellow fangs.
The terrified wizards turned to run and found themselves bumping into bookshelves that had unaccountably blocked the aisles. The smallest wizard yelped and rolled under a table laden with atlases, and lay with his hands over his ears to block out the dreadful sounds as the remaining wizards tried to escape.
Eventually there was nothing but silence, but it was that particularly massive silence created by something moving very stealthily, as it might be, in search of something else. The smallest wizard ate the tip of his hat out of sheer terror.
The silent mover grabbed him by the leg and pulled him gently but firmly out into the open, where he gibbered a bit with his eyes shut and then, when ghastly teeth failed to meet in his throat, ventured a quick glance.
The Librarian picked him up by the scruff of his neck and dangled him reflectively a foot off the ground, just out of reach of a small and elderly wire-haired terrier who was trying to remember how to bite people’s ankles.
‘Er-! said the wizard, and was then thrown in an almost flat trajectory through the broken doorway, where his fall was broken by the floor.
After a while a shadow next to him said, ‘Well, that’s it, then. Anyone seen that daft bastard Sconner?’
And a shadow on the other side of him said, ‘I think my neck’s broken.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘That daft bastard,’ said the shadow, nastily.
‘Oh. Sorry, Sconner.’
Sconner stood up, his whole body now outlined in magical aura. He was trembling with rage as he raised his hands.
‘I’ll show that wretched throwback to respect his evolutionary superiors-’ he snarled.
‘Get him, lads!’
And Sconner was borne to the flagstones again under the weight of all five wizards.
‘Sorry, but-’
‘- you know that if you use-’