Sourcery - A Novel Of Discworld Part 18

Rincewind looked up at the fifteen-foot-deep walls of the snake pit, and rubbed his bruises.

"I might," he said cautiously.

"In that case, you wouldn't mind taking me with you, would you?"

"Eh?"

"It's a lot to ask, I know, but this pit is, well, it's the pits."

"Take you? But you're a snake, it's your your pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things." pit. The idea is that you stay here and people come to you. I mean, I know about these things."

A shadow behind the snake unfolded itself and stood up.

"That's a pretty unpleasant thing to say about anyone," it said.

The figure stepped forward, into the pool of light.

It was a young man, taller than Rincewind. That is to say, Rincewind was sitting down, but the boy would have been taller than him even if he was standing up.

To say that he was lean would be to miss a perfect opportunity to use the word "emaciated." He looked as though toast racks and deckchairs had figured in his ancestry, and the reason it was so obvious was his clothes.

Rincewind looked again.

He had been right the first time.

The lank-haired figure in front of him was wearing the practically traditional garb for barbarian heroes-a few studded leather thongs, big furry boots, a little leather holdall and goosepimples. There was nothing unusual about that, you'd see a score of similarly-dressed adventurers in any street of Ankh-Morpork, except that you'd never see another one wearing- The young man followed his gaze, looked down, and shrugged.

"I can't help it," he said. "I promised my mother."

"Woolly underwear?"

Strange things were happening in Al Khali that night. There was a certain silveriness rolling in from the sea, which baffled the city's astronomers, but that wasn't the strangest thing. There were little flashes of raw magic discharging off sharp edges, like static electricity, but that wasn't the strangest thing.

The strangest thing walked into a tavern on the edge of the city, where the everlasting wind blew the smell of the desert through every unglazed window, and sat down in the middle of the floor.

The occupants watched it for some time, sipping their coffee laced with desert orakh orakh. This drink, made from cacti sap and scorpion venom, is one of the most virulent alcoholic beverages in the universe, but the desert nomads don't drink it for its intoxicating effects. They use it because they need something to mitigate the effect of Klatchian coffee.

Not because you could use the coffee to waterproof roofs. Not because it went through the untrained stomach lining like a hot ball bearing through runny b.u.t.ter. What it did was worse.

It made you knurd.*

The sons of the desert glanced suspiciously into their thimble-sized coffee-cups, and wondered whether they had overdone the orakh. Were they all seeing the same thing? Would it be foolish to pa.s.s a remark? These are the sort of things you need to worry about if you want to retain any credibility as a steely-eyed son of the deep desert. Pointing a shaking finger and saying, "Hey, look, a box just walked in here on hundreds of little legs, isn't that extraordinary!" would show a terrible and possibly fatal lack of machismo.

The drinkers tried not to catch one another's eye, even when the Luggage slid up to the row of orakh jars against the far wall. The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.

Finally one of them said, "I think it wants a drink."

There was a long silence, and then one of the others said, with the precision of a chess Grand Master making a killing move, "What does?"

The rest of the drinkers gazed impa.s.sively into their gla.s.ses.

There was no sound for a while other than the plopplopping of a gecko's footsteps across the sweating ceiling.

The first drinker said, "The demon that's just moved up behind you is what I was referring to, O brother of the sands."

The current holder of the All-Wadi Imperturbability Champions.h.i.+p smiled gla.s.sily until he felt a tugging on his robe. The smile stayed where it was but the rest of his face didn't seem to want to be a.s.sociated with it.

The Luggage was feeling crossed in love and was doing what any sensible person would do in these circ.u.mstances, which was get drunk. It had no money and no way of asking for what it wanted, but the Luggage somehow never had much difficulty in making itself understood.

The tavern keeper spent a very long lonely night filling a saucer with orakh, before the Luggage rather unsteadily walked out through one of the walls.

The desert was silent. It wasn't normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the h.e.l.l out of it.

"I promised my mother," said the boy. "I get these colds, you see."

"Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?"

"Oh, I couldn't do that. You've got to wear all this leather stuff."

"I wouldn't call it all all," said Rincewind. "There's not enough of it to call it all all. Why have you got to wear it?"

"So people know I'm a barbarian hero, of course."

Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.

Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn't mad because, if he was was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met. mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.

Barbarian hero," he murmured.

"It's all right, isn't it? All this leather stuff was very expensive."

"Yes, but, look-what's your name, lad?"

"Nijel-"

"You see, Nijel-"

"Nijel the Destroyer," Nijel added.

"You see, Nijel-"

"-the Destroyer-"

"All right, the Destroyer-" said Rincewind desperately.

"-son of Harebut the Provision Merchant-"

"What?"

"You've got to be the son of someone," Nijel explained. "It says it here somewhere-" He half-turned and fumbled inside a grubby fur bag, eventually bringing out a thin, torn and grubby book.

"There's a bit in here about selecting your name," he muttered.

"How come you ended up in this pit, then?"

"I was intending to steal from Creosote's treasury, but I had an asthma attack," said Nijel, still fumbling through the crackling pages.

Rincewind looked down at the snake, which was still trying to keep out of everyone's way. It had a good thing going in the pit, and knew trouble when it saw it. It wasn't about to cause any irritation for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.

"How long have you been a barbarian hero?"

"I'm just getting started. I've always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along." Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. "That's all right, isn't it?"

"It's a desperate sort of life, by all accounts," Rincewind volunteered.

"Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?" Nijel muttered darkly.

Rincewind thought.

"Is lettuce involved?" he said.

"Oh yes," said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.

Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn't do.

"Do you know any lamp wick jokes?" he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.

"I don't think so," said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.

"I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp wick?"

"This slab moves," said Nijel. "Look, it's a sort of door. Give me a hand."

He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.

"I expect it's some sort of secret pa.s.sage," he added. "Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It's stuck."

"Don't you want to hear the rest of the joke?" said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.

"I think not right at the moment," said Nijel. "I think I would prefer a bit of magical a.s.sistance."

"I'm not very good at it," said Rincewind. "Never got the hang of it, see, it's more than just pointing a finger at it and saying 'Kazam-'"

There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smas.h.i.+ng it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.

After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.

"Yes," he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. "Well. Very good. We'll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going."

He cleared his throat a bit.

"Nnh," said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm's length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn't got longer arms.

Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.

"It seems to open into some kind of room," he said.

"Nnh."

"After you," said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.

The wizard staggered forward, b.u.mped his head on the rock and didn't appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.

Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. "Can you feel something?" he said. "Should the stone be trembling?"

"Nnh."

"Are you all right?"

"Nnh."

Nijel put his ear to the stones. "There's a very strange noise," he said. "A sort of humming." A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.

Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.

Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noise and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.

If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.

A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.

Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and b.u.mped into him standing, surrounded by an octarine corona, in another cave.

Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flas.h.i.+ng eyes and floating hair.

He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.

Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.

"I say," said Nijel, "are you all right?"