Rincewind pulled off his hat. It was battered, stained and covered with rock dust, bits of it had been sheared off, the point was dented and the star was shedding sequins like pollen, but the word “blizzard” was still just readable under the grime.
‘See this?’ he demanded, red in the face. ‘Do you see it? Do you? What does it tell you?’
‘That you can’t spell?’ said Nijel.
‘What? No! It says I’m a wizard, that’s what! Twenty years behind the staff, and proud of it! I’ve done my time, I have! I’ve pas - I’ve sat dozens of exams! If all the spells I’ve read were piled on top of one another, they’d … it’d … you’d have a lot of spells!’
‘Yes, but-’ Conina began.
‘Yes?’
‘You’re not actually very good at them, are you?’
Rincewind glared at her. He tried to think of what to say next, and a small receptor area opened in his mind at the same time as an inspiration particle, its path bent and skewed by a trillion random events, screamed down through the atmosphere and burst silently just at the right spot.
‘Talent just defines what you do,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t define what you are. Deep down, I mean. When you know what you are, you can do anything.’
He thought a bit more and added, ‘That’s what makes sourcerers so powerful. The important thing is to know what you really are.’
There was a pause full of philosophy.
‘Rincewind?’ said Conina, kindly.
‘Hmm?’ said Rincewind, who was still wondering how the words got into his head.
‘You really are an idiot. Do you know that?’
‘You will all stand very still.’
Abrim the vizier stepped out of a ruined archway. He was wearing the Archchancellor’s hat.
The desert fried under the flame of the sun. Nothing moved except the shimmering air, hot as a stolen volcano, dry as a skull.
A basilisk lay panting in the baking shade of a rock, dribbling corrosive yellow slime. For the last five minutes its ears had been detecting the faint thump of hundreds of little legs moving unsteadily over the dunes, which seemed to indicate that dinner was on the way.
It blinked its legendary eyes and uncoiled twenty feet of hungry body, winding out and on to the sand like fluid death.
The Luggage staggered to a halt and raised its lid threateningly. The basilisk hissed, but a little uncertainly, because it had never seen a walking box before, and certainly never one with lots of alligator teeth stuck in its lid. There were also scraps of leathery hide adhering to it, as though it had been involved in a fight in a handbag factory, and in a way that the basilisk wouldn’t have been able to describe even if it could talk, it appeared to be glaring.
Right, the reptile thought, if that’s the way you want to play it.
It turned on the Luggage a stare like a diamond drill, a stare that nipped in via the staree’s eyeballs and flayed the brain from the inside, a stare that tore the frail net curtains on the windows of the soul, a stare that
The basilisk realised something was very wrong. An entirely new and unwelcome sensation started to arise just behind its saucer-shaped eyes. It started small, like the little itch in those few square inches of back that no amount of writhing will allow you to scratch, and grew until it became a second, red-hot, internal sun.
The basilisk was feeling a terrible, overpowering and irresistible urge to blink …
It did something incredibly unwise.
It blinked.
‘He’s talking through his hat,’ said Rincewind.
‘Eh?’ said Nijel, who was beginning to realise that the world of the barbarian hero wasn’t the clean, simple place he had imagined in the days when the most exciting thing he had ever done was stack parsnips.
‘The hat’s talking through him, you mean,’ said Conina, and she backed away too, as one tends to do in the presence of horror.
‘Eh?’