‘I will not harm you. You have been of some service,’ said Abrim, stepping forwards with his hands out. ‘But you are right. He thought he could gain power through wearing me. Of course, it is the other way around. An astonishingly devious and clever mind.’
‘So you tried his head on for size?’ said Rincewind. He shuddered. He’d worn the hat. Obviously he didn’t have the right kind of mind. Abrim did have the right kind of mind, and now his eyes were grey and colourless, his skin was pale and he walked as though his body was hanging down from his head.
Nijel had pulled out his book and was riffling feverishly through the pages.
‘What on earth are you doing?’ said Conina, not taking her eyes off the ghastly figure.
‘I’m looking up the Index of Wandering Monsters,’ said Nijel. ‘Do you think it’s an Undead? They’re awfully difficult to kill, you need garlic and,-’
‘You won’t find this in there,’ said Rincewind slowly. ‘It’s - it’s a vampire hat.’
‘Of course, it might be a Zombie,’ said Nijel, running his finger down a page. ‘It says here you need black pepper and sea salt, but-’
‘You’re supposed to fight the bloody things, not eat them,’ said Conina.
‘This is a mind I can use,’ said the hat. ‘Now I can fight back. I shall rally wizardry. There is room for only one magic in this world, and I embody it. Sourcery beware!’
‘Oh, no,’ said Rincewind under his breath.
‘Wizardry has learned a lot in the last twenty centuries. This upstart can be beaten. You three will follow me.’
It wasn’t a request. It wasn’t even an order. It was a sort of forecast. The voice of the hat went straight to the hindbrain without bothering to deal with the consciousness, and Rincewind’s legs started to move of their own accord.
The other two also jerked forward, walking with the awkward doll-like jerking that suggested that they, too, were on invisible strings.
‘Why the oh, no?’ said Conina, ‘I mean, “Oh, no” on general principles I can understand, but was there any particular reason?’
‘If we get a chance we must run,’ said Rincewind.
‘Did you have anywhere in mind?’
‘It probably won’t matter. We’re doomed anyway.’
‘Why?’ said Nijel.
‘Well,’ said Rincewind, ‘have you ever heard of the Mage Wars?’
There were a lot of things on the Disc that owed their origin to the Mage Wars. Sapient pearwood was one of them.
The original tree was probably perfectly normal and spent its days drinking groundwater and eating sunshine in a state of blessed unawareness and then the magic wars broke around it and pitchforked its genes into a state of acute perspicacity.
It also left it ingrained, as it were, with a bad temper. But sapient pearwood got off lightly.
Once, when the level of background magic on the Disc was young and high and found every opportunity to burst on the world, wizards were all as powerful as sourcerers and built their towers on every hilltop. And if there was one thing a really powerful wizard can’t stand, it is another wizard. His instinctive approach to diplomacy is to hex ‘em till they glow, then curse them in the dark.
That could only mean one thing. All right, two things. Three things.
All-out. Thaumaturgical. War.
And there were of course no alliances, no sides, no deals, no mercy, no cease. The skies twisted, the seas boiled. The scream and whizz of fireballs turned the night into day, but that was all right because the ensuing clouds of black smoke turned the day into night. The landscape rose and fell like a honeymoon duvet, and the very fabric of space itself was tied in multidimensional knots and bashed on a flat stone down by the river of Time. For example, a popular spell at the time was Pelepel’s Temporal Compressor, which on one occasion resulted in a race of giant reptiles being created, evolving, spreading, flourishing and then being destroyed in the space of about five minutes, leaving only its bones in the earth to mislead forthcoming generations completely. Trees swam, fishes walked, mountains strolled down to the shops for a packet of cigarettes, and the mutability of existence was such that the first thing any cautious person would do when they woke up in the mornings was count their arms and legs.
That was, in fact, the problem. All the wizards were pretty evenly matched and in any case lived in high towers well protected with spells, which meant that most magical weapons rebounded and landed on the common people who were trying to scratch an honest living from what was, temporarily, the soil, and lead ordinary, decent (but rather short) lives.
But still the fighting raged, battering the very structure of the universe of order, weakening the walls of reality and threatening to topple the whole rickety edifice of time and space into the darkness of the Dungeon Dimensions …
One story said that the gods stepped in, but the gods don’t usually take a hand in human affairs unless it amuses them. Another one - and this was the one that the wizards themselves told, and wrote down in their books - was that the wizards themselves got together and settled their differences amicably for the good of mankind. And this was generally accepted as the true account, despite being as internally likely as a lead lifebelt.
The truth isn’t easily pinned to a page. In the bathtub of history the truth is harder to hold than the soap, and much more difficult to find …