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.’
It was a strange figure that made its hesitant way to the door. Ordinary robes weren’t sufficient protection in the high-energy field inside the tower, and over his brocade and velvet the wizard wore a thick, padded overall stuffed with rowan shavings and embroidered with industrial-grade sigils. He’d affixed a smoked glass visor to his pointy hat and his gauntlets, which were extremely big, suggested that he was a wicket keeper in a game of cricket played at supersonic speeds. The actinic flashes and pulsations from the great work in the main hall cast harsh shadows around him as he fumbled for the bolts.
He pulled down the visor and opened the door a fraction.
‘We don’t want any—’ he began, and ought to have chosen his words better, because they were his epitaph.
It was some time before his colleague noticed his continued absence, and wandered down the passage to find him. The door had been thrown wide open, the thaumatic inferno outside roaring against the web of spells that held it in check. In fact the door hadn’t been pushed completely back; he pulled it aside to see why, and gave a little whimper.
There was a noise behind him. He turned around.
‘Wha—’ he began, which is a pretty poor syllable on which to end a life.
High over the Circle Sea Rincewind was feeling a bit of an idiot.
This happens to everyone sooner or later.
For example, in a tavern someone jogs your elbow and you turn around quickly and give a mouthful of abuse to, you become slowly aware, the belt buckle of a man who, it turns out, was probably hewn rather than born.
Or a little car runs into the back of yours and you rush out to show a bunch of fives to the driver who, it becomes apparent as he goes on unfolding more body like some horrible conjuring trick, must have been sitting on the back seat.
Or you might be leading your mutinous colleagues to the captain’s cabin and you hammer on the door and he sticks his great head out with a cutlass in either hand and you say ‘We’re taking over the ship, you scum, and the lads are right with me!’ and he says ‘What lads?’ and you suddenly feel a great emptiness behind you and you say ‘Um…’
In other words, it’s the familiar hot sinking feeling experienced by everyone who has let the waves of their own anger throw them far up on the beach of retribution, leaving them, in the poetic language of the everyday, up shit creek.
Rincewind was still angry and humiliated and so forth, but these emotions had died down a bit and something of his normal character had reasserted itself. It was not very pleased to find itself on a few threads of blue and gold wool high above the phosphorescent waves.
He’d been heading for Ankh-Morpork. He tried to remember why.
Of course, it was where it had all started. Perhaps it was the presence of the University, which was so heavy with magic it lay like a cannonball on the incontinence blanket of the Universe, stretching reality very thin. Ankh was where things started, and finished.
It was also his home, such as it was, and it called to him.
It has already been indicated that Rincewind appeared to have a certain amount of rodent in his ancestry, and in times of stress he felt an overpowering urge to make a run for his burrow.
He let the carpet drift for a while on the air currents while dawn, which Creosote would probably have referred to as pink-fingered, made a ring of fire around the edge of the Disc. It spread its lazy light over a world that was subtly different.
Rincewind blinked. There was a weird light. No, now he came to think about it, not weird but wyrd, which was much weirder. It was like looking at the world through a heat haze, but a haze that had a sort of life of its own. It danced and stretched, and gave more than a hint that it wasn’t just an optical illusion but that it was reality itself that was being tensed and distended, like a rubber balloon trying to contain too much gas.
The wavering was greatest in the direction of Ankh-Morpork, where flashes and fountains of tortured air indicated that the struggle hadn’t abated. A similar column hung over Al Khali, and then Rincewind realised that it wasn’t the only one.
Wasn’t that a tower over in Quirm, where the Circle Sea opened on to the great Rim Ocean? And there were others.
It had all gone critical. Wizardry was breaking up. Goodbye to the University, the levels, the Orders; deep in his heart, every wizard knew that the natural unit of wizardry was one wizard. The towers would multiply and fight until there was one tower left, and then the wizards would fight until there was one wizard.
By then, he’d probably fight himself.
The whole edifice that operated as the balance wheel of magic was falling to bits. Rincewind resented that, deeply. He’d never been any good at magic, but that wasn’t the point. He knew where he fitted. It was right at the bottom, but at least he fitted. He could look up and see the whole delicate machine ticking away, gently, browsing off the natural magic generated by the turning of the Disc.
All he had was nothing, but that was something, and now it had been taken away.
Rincewind turned the carpet until it was facing the distant gleam that was Ankh-Morpork, which was a brilliant speck in the early morning light, and a part of his mind that wasn’t doing anything else wondered why it was so bright. There also seemed to be a full moon, and even Rincewind, whose grasp of natural philosophy was pretty vague, was sure there had been one of those only the other day.
Well, it didn’t matter. He’d had enough. He wasn’t going to try to understand anything any more. He was going home.
Except that wizards can never go home.
This is one of the ancient and deeply meaningful sayings about wizards and it says something about most of them that they have never been able to work out what it means. Wizards aren’t allowed to have wives but they are allowed to have parents, and many of them go back to the old home town for Hogswatch Night or Soul Cake Thursday, for a bit of a sing-song and the heart-warming sight of all their boyhood bullies hurriedly avoiding them in the street.
It’s rather like the other saying they’ve never been able to understand, which is that you can’t cross the same river twice. Experiments with a long-legged wizard and a small river say you can cross the same river thirty, thirty-five times a minute.
Wizards don’t like philosophy very much. As far as they are concerned, one hand clapping makes a noise like ‘cl’.