‘Well, they make me sick,’ muttered Creosote, who was feeling acutely sober and didn’t like it much.
‘I think we’ll all feel better if we try to get a bit more sleep,’ said Nijel diplomatically. ‘Things always look better by daylight. Nearly always, anyway.’
‘My mouth feels all horrible, too,’ muttered Creosote, determined to cling on to the remnant of his anger.
Conina turned back to the fire, and became aware of a gap in the scenery. It was Rincewind-shaped.
‘He’s gone!’
In fact Rincewind was already half a mile out over the dark sea, squatting on the carpet like an angry buddha, his mind a soup of rage, humiliation and fury, with a side order of outrage.
He hadn’t wanted much, ever. He’d stuck with wizardry even though he wasn’t any good at it, he’d always done his best, and now the whole world was conspiring against him. Well, he’d show them. Precisely who “they” were and what they were going to be shown was merely a matter of detail.
He reached up and touched his hat for reassurance, even as it lost its last few sequins in the slipstream.
The Luggage was having problems of its own.
The area around the tower of Al Khali, under the relentless magical bombardment, was already drifting beyond that reality horizon where time, space and matter lose their separate identities and start wearing one another’s clothes. It was quite impossible to describe.
Here is what it looked like.
It looked like a piano sounds shortly after being dropped down a well. It tasted yellow, and felt Paisley. It smelled like a total eclipse of the moon. Of course, nearer to the tower it got really weird.
Expecting anything unprotected to survive in that would be like expecting snow on a supernova. Fortunately the Luggage didn’t know this, and slid through the maelstrom with raw magic crystallising on its lid and hinges. It was in a foul mood but, again, there was nothing very unusual about this, except that the crackling fury earthing itself spectacularly all over the Luggage in a multi-coloured corona gave it the appearance of an early and very angry amphibian crawling out of a burning swamp.
It was hot and stuffy inside the tower. There were no internal floors, just a series of walkways around the walls. They were lined with wizards, and the central space was a column of octarine light that creaked loudly as they poured their power into it. At its base stood Abrim, the octarine gems on the hat blazing so brightly that they looked more like holes cut through into a different universe where, in defiance of probability, they had come out inside a sun.
The vizier stood with his hands out, fingers splayed, eyes shut, mouth a thin line of concentration, balancing the forces. Usually a wizard could control power only to the extent of his own physical capability, but Abrim was learning fast.
You made yourself the pinch in the hourglass, the fulcrum on the balance, the roll around the sausage.
Do it right and you were the power, it was part of you and you were capable of-
Has it been pointed out that his feet were several inches off the ground? His feet were several inches off the ground.
Abrim was pulling together the potency for a spell that would soar away into the sky and beset the Ankh tower with a thousand screaming demons when there came a thunderous knock at the door.
There is a mantra to be said on these occasions. It doesn’t matter if the door is a tent flap, a scrap of hide on a wind-blown yurt, three inches of solid oak with great iron nails in or a rectangle of chipboard with mahogany veneer, a small light over it made of horrible bits of coloured glass and a bellpush that plays a choice of twenty popular melodies that no music lover would want to listen to even after five years’ sensory deprivation.
One wizard turned to another and duly said: ‘I wonder who that can be at this time of night?’
There was another series of thumps on the woodwork.
‘There can’t be anyone alive out there,’ said the other wizard, and he said it nervously, because if you ruled out the possibility of it being anyone alive that always left the suspicion that perhaps it was someone dead.
This time the banging rattled the hinges.
‘One of us had better go out,’ said the first wizard.
‘Good man.’
‘Ah. Oh. Right.’
He set off slowly down the short, arched passage.
‘I’ll just go and see who it is, then?’ he said.
‘First class.’