Smoke drifted over the city in long greasy coils from the crown of boiling air above the University. It was the only movement, apart from the fountains.
Rincewind had always been rather proud of the fact that he always felt alone, even in the teeming city, but it was even worse being alone when he was by himself.
He rolled up the carpet and slung it over one shoulder and padded through the haunted streets towards the University.
The gates hung open to the wind. Most of the building looked half ruined by misses and ricochets. The tower of sourcery, far too high to be real, seemed to be unscathed. Not so the old Tower of Art. Half the magic aimed at the tower next door seemed to have rebounded on it. Parts of it had melted and started to run; some parts glowed, some parts had crystallised, a few parts seemed to have twisted partly out of the normal three dimensions. It made you feel sorry even for stone that it should have to undergo such treatment. In fact nearly everything had happened to the tower except actual collapse. It looked so beaten that possibly even gravity had given up on it.
Rincewind sighed, and padded around the base of the tower towards the Library.
Towards where the Library had been.
There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.
Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.
Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of a bookcase still smouldered.
Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backwards and forwards across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.
They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.
Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.
The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.
There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas.
He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for sometime until the end fell off.
Then he ate it.
‘We shouldn’t have let him go like that,’ said Conina.
‘How could we have stopped him, oh, beauteous doeeyed eaglet?’
‘But he may do something stupid!’
‘I should think that is very likely,’ said Creosote primly.
‘While we do something clever and sit on a baking beach with nothing to eat or drink, is that it?’
‘You could tell me a story,’ said Creosote, trembling slightly.
‘Shut up.’
The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.
‘I suppose a quick anecdote is out of the question?’ he croaked.
Conina sighed. ‘There’s more to life than narrative, you know.’
‘Sorry. I lost control a little, there.’
Now that the sun was well up the crushed-shell beach glowed like a salt flat. The sea didn’t look any better by daylight. It moved like thin oil.
Away on either side the beach stretched in long, excruciatingly flat curves, supporting nothing but a few clumps of withered dune grass which lived off the moisture in the spray. There was no sign of any shade.
‘The way I see it,’ said Conina, ‘this is a beach, and that means sooner or later we’ll come to a river, so all we have to do is keep walking in one direction.’