The figure stared upwards.
MR SKY?
‘No-one’s called Mr Sky.’
MR … DOOR?
She nodded.
‘Could be. Could be Mr Door. There was a chap called Doors I knew once. Yeah. Mr Door. And your first name? Don’t tell me you haven’t got one of those, too. You’ve got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names.’
YES.
‘What?’
ONE OF THOSE.
‘Which one?’
ER. THE FIRST ONE?
‘You’re a Bill?’
YES?
Miss Flitworth rolled her eyes.
‘All right, Bill Sky …’ she said.
DOOR.
‘Yeah. Sorry. All right, Bill Door …’
CALL ME BILL.
‘And you can call me Miss Flitworth. I expect you want some dinner?’
I WOULD? AH. YES. THE MEAL OF THE EVENING. YES.
‘You look half starved, to tell the truth. More than half, really.’ She squinted at the figure. Somehow it was very hard to be certain what Bill Door looked like, or even remember the exact sound of his voice. Clearly he was there, and clearly he had spoken – otherwise why did you remember anything at all?
‘There’s a lot of people in these parts as don’t use the name they were born with,’ she said. ‘l always say there’s
nothing to be gained by going around asking pers’nal questions. I suppose you can work, Mr Bill Door? I’m still getting the hay in off the high meadows and there’ll be a lot of work come harvest. Can you use a scythe?’
Bill Door seemed to meditate on the question for some time. Then he said, I THINK THE ANSWER TO THAT IS A DEFINITE ‘YES’, MISS FLITWORTH.
Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of ‘Are these things yours to sell?’ But no-one appeared to be coming forward to berate him for selling off their property, and that was good enough for him. He’d sold more than a thousand of the little globes this morning, and he’d had to employ a troll to keep up a flow from the mysterious source of supply in the cellar.
People loved them.
The principle of operation was laughably simple and easily graspable by the average Ankh-Morpork citizen after a few false starts.
If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.
And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him – although morally, of course, morally they were his – he couldn’t actually complain.
Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap. Get ‘em off your hands – it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said ‘Who, me?’
They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely
enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:
fo r3
4h~ MorPor’
Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor. * He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favourite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulphur and saltpetre for added potency.
Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.
There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully
________________________________________________________________
* Someone who will put certainly salt and probably pepper on any meal you put in front of them whatever it is and regardless of how much it’s got on it already and regardless of how it tastes. Behavioural psychiatrists working for fast-food outlets around the universe have saved billions of whatever the local currency is by noting the autocondimenting phenomenon and advising their employers to leave seasoning out in the first place. This is really true.
senior’s death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.
Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.
The cruet moved.
He reached out again. It slid away.
Ridcully sighed.
‘All right, you fellows,’ he said.‘No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?’
The other senior wizards stared at him.
‘I, I, I don’t think we can play it any more, ‘ said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, ‘I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces …’
He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.
The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.
The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.
‘It was probably the sauce,’ the Dean ventured.‘It was definitely going a bit critical last night.’
Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.
Another one mildly contused the Bursar.
After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor’s hand and stuck there.
The wizards turned their eyes upwards.
The Great Hall was lit in the evenings by one massive chandelier, although the word so often associated with glittering prismatic glassware seemed inappropriate for the huge, heavy, black, tallow-encrusted thing that hung from the ceiling like a threatening overdraft. It could hold a thousand candles. It was directly over the senior wizards’ table.
Another screw tinkled on to the floor by the fireplace.
The Archchancellor cleared his throat.
‘Run?’ he suggested.
The chandelier dropped.
Bits of table and crockery smashed into the walls.
Lumps of lethal tallow the size of a man’s head whirred through the windows. A whole candle, propelled out of the wreckage at a freak velocity, was driven several inches into a door.
The Archchancellor disentangled himself from the remains of his chair.
‘Bursar!’ he yelled.
The Bursar was exhumed from the fireplace.
‘Um, yes, Archchancellor?’ he quavered.
‘What was the meanin’ of that?’
Ridcully’s hat rose from his head.
It was a basic floppy-brimmed, pointy wizarding hat, but adapted to the Archchancellor’s outgoing lifestyle. Fishing flies were stuck in it. A very small pistol crossbow was shoved in the hatband in case he saw something to shoot while out jogging, and Mustrum Ridcully had found that the pointy bit was just the right size for a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Old Peculiar Brandy. He was quite attached to his hat.
But it was no longer attached to him.
It drifted gently across the room. There was a faint but distinct gurgling noise.
The Archchancellor leapt to his feet.‘Bugger that,’ he roared.‘That stuff’s nine dollars a fifth!’ He made a leap for the hat, missed, and kept on going until he drifted to a halt several feet above the ground.
The Bursar raised a hand, nervously.
‘Possibly woodworm?’ he said.
‘If there is any more of this,’ growled Ridcully, ‘anymore at all, d’you hear, I shall get very angry!’
He was dropped to the floor at the same time as the big doors opened. One of the college porters bustled in, followed by a squad of the Patrician’s palace guard.
The guard captain looked the Archchancellor up and down with the expression of one to whom the
word ‘civilian’ is pronounced in the same general tones as ‘cockroach’.
‘You the head chap?’ he said.
The Archchancellor smoothed his robe and tried to straighten his beard.
‘I am the Archchancellor of this university, yes,’ he said.
The guard captain looked curiously around the hall.
The students were all cowering down the far end. Splashed food covered most of the walls to ceiling height. Bits of furniture lay around the wreckage of the chandelier like trees around ground zero of a meteor strike.
Then he spoke with all the distaste of someone whose own further education had stopped at age nine, but who’d heard stories …
‘Indulging in a bit of youthful high spirits, were we?’ he said.‘Throwin’ a few bread rolls around, that kind of thing?’