The Senior Wrangler groaned and put his hand over his eyes.
Ridcully flapped his hat in front of the heap.
‘Biodegradable garbage!’
‘Poor green trash?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes helpfully.
‘That’s the ticket,’ said the Archchancellor.‘Try to infuriate the bugger.’ (Behind him, a slightly different variety of mad waspy creature popped out of the air and buzzed away.)
The heap lunged at the hat.
‘Midden!’ said Ridcully.
‘Oh, I say,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, shocked.
The Dean and the Bursar crept forward, grabbed a gardener’s foot each, and pulled. Modo slid out of the heap.
‘It ‘s eaten through his clothes !’ said the Dean.
‘But is he all right?’
‘He’s still breathing,’ said the Bursar.
‘And if he’s lucky, he’s lost his sense of smell, ‘ said the Dean.
The heap snapped at Ridcully’s hat. There was a glop. The point of the hat had vanished.
‘Hey, there was still almost half a bottle in there!’ Ridcully roared. The Senior Wrangler grabbed his arm.
‘ Come on, Archchancellor !’
The heap swivelled and lunged towards the Bursar.
The wizards backed away.
‘ It can’t be intelligent, can it?’ said the Bursar.
‘All it’s doing is moving around slowly and eating things, ‘ said the Dean.
‘Put a pointy hat on it and it’d be a faculty member,’ said the Archchancellor.
The heap came after them.
‘I wouldn’t call that moving slowly,’ said the Dean.
They looked expectantly at the Archchancellor.
‘Run!’
Portly though most of the faculty were, they hit a fair turn of speed up the cloisters, fought one another through the door, slammed it behind them and leaned on it. Very soon afterwards, there was a damp, heavy thud on the far side.
‘We’re well out of that,’ said the Bursar.
The Dean looked down.
‘I think it’s coming through the door, Archchancellor,’ he said, in a tiny voice.
‘Don’t be daft, man, we’re all leanin’ on it.’
‘I didn’t mean through, I mean … through …’
The Archchancellor sniffed.
‘What’s burnin’?’
‘Your boots, Archchancellor,’ said the Dean.
Ridcully looked down. A greenish-yellow puddle was spreading under the door. The wood was charring, the flagstones were hissing, and the leather soles of his boots were definitely in trouble. He could feel himself getting lower.
He fumbled with the laces, and then took a standing jump on to a dry flagstone.
‘Bursar!’
‘Yes, Archchancellor?’
‘Give me your boots!’
‘What?’
‘Dammit, man, I command you to give me your blasted boots!’
This time, a long creature with four pairs of wings, two at each end, and three eyes, popped into existence over Ridcully’s head and dropped on to his hat.
‘But -‘
‘I am your Archchancellor!’
‘Yes, but -‘
‘I think the hinges are going,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
Ridcully looked around desperately.
‘We’ll regroup in the Great Hall,’ he said.‘We’ll … strategically withdraw to previously prepared positions.’
‘Who prepared them?’ said the Dean.
‘We’ll prepare them when we get there,’ said the Archchancellor through gritted teeth.‘Bursar! Your boots! Now!’
They reached the double doors of the Great Hall just as the door behind them half-collapsed, half-dissolved. The Great Hall’s doors were much sturdier.
Bolts and bars were dragged into place.
‘Clear the tables and pile them up in front of the door,’ snapped Ridcully
‘But it eats through wood, ‘ said the Dean.
There was a moan from the small body of Modo, which had been propped against a chair. He opened his eyes.
‘Quick!’ said Ridcully. ‘How can we kill a compost heap?’
‘Um. I don’t think you can, Mr Ridcully, sir,’ said the gardener.
‘How about fire? I could probably manage a small fireball, ‘ said the Dean.
‘It wouldn’t work. Too soggy,’ said Ridcully.
‘It’s right outside! It’s eating away at the door! It’s eating away at the door,’ sang the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
The wizards backed further away down the length of the hall.
‘I hope it doesn’t eat too much wood,’ said the dazed Modo, radiating genuine concern.‘They’re a devil, excuse my Klatchian, if you get too much carbon in
them. It’s far too heating.’
‘You know, this is exactly the right time for a lecture on the dynamics of compost making, Modo, ‘ said the Dean.
Dwarfs do not know the meaning of the word “irony”.
‘Well, all right. Ahem. The correct balance of materials, correctly layered according to -‘
‘There goes the door,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, lumbering towards the rest of them.
The mound of furniture started to move forward.
The Archchancellor stared desperately around the hall, at a loss. Then his eyes were drawn to a familiar, heavy bottle on one of the sideboards.
‘Carbon,’ he said. ‘That’s like charcoal, isn’t it?’
‘How should I know? I’m not an alchemist,’ sniffed the Dean.
The compost heap emerged from the debris. Steam poured off it.
The Archchancellor looked longingly at the bottle of Wow-Wow Sauce. He uncorked it. He took a deep sniff.
‘The cooks here just can’t make it properly, you know,’ he said. It’ll be weeks before I can get any more from home.’
He tossed the bottle towards the advancing heap.
It vanished into the seething mass.
‘Stinging nettles are always useful,’ said Modo, behind him. ‘They add iron. And comfrey, well, you can never get enough comfrey. For the minerals, you know. Myself, I’ve always reckoned that a small quantity of wild yarrow -‘
The wizards peered over the top of an overturned table.
The heap had stopped moving.
‘Is it just me, or is it getting bigger?’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘And looking happier,’ said the Dean.
‘It smells awful,’ said the Bursar.
‘Oh, well. And that was nearly a full bottle of sauce, too,’ said the Archchancellor sadly. ‘I’d hardly opened ?it?.’
‘Nature’s a wonderful thing, when you come to think
about it,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘You don’t all have to glare at me like that, you know. I was only passing a remark.’
‘There are times when -‘ Ridcully began, and then the compost heap exploded.
It wasn’t a bang or a boom. It was the dampest, most corpulent eruption in the history of terminal flatulence. Dark red flame, fringed with black, roared up to the ceiling. Pieces of heap rocketed across the hall and slapped wetly into the walls.
The wizards peered out from their barricade, which was now thick with tea-leaves.
A cabbage stalk dropped softly on to the Dean’s head.
He looked at a small, bubbling patch on the flagstones.
His face split slowly into a grin.
‘Wow,’ he said.
The other wizards unfolded themselves. Adrenaline backwash worked its seductive spell. They grinned, too, and started playfully punching one another on the shoulder.
‘Eat hot sauce!’ roared the Archchancellor. ‘Up against the hedge, fermented rubbish!’
‘Can we kick ass, or can we kick ass?’ burbled the Dean happily.
‘You mean can’t the second time, not can. And I’m not sure that a compost heap can be said to have an -‘ the Senior Wrangler began, but the tide of excitement was flowing against him.
‘That’s one heap that won’t mess with wizards again,’ said the Dean, who was getting carried away.
‘We’re keen and mean and -‘
‘There’s three more of them out there, Modo says,’ said the Bursar.
They fell silent.
‘We could go and pick up our staffs, couldn’t we?’ said the Dean.
The Archchancellor prodded a piece of exploded heap with the toe of his boot.
‘Dead things coming alive,’ he murmured.‘I don’t like that. What’s next? Walking statues?’
The wizards looked up at the statues of dead Archchancellors that lined the Great Hall and, indeed, most of the corridors of the University. The University had been in existence for thousands of years and the average Archchancellor remained in office for about eleven months, so there were plenty of statues.
‘You know, I really wish you hadn’t said that, ‘ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘It was just a thought,’ said Ridcully.‘Come on, let’s have a look at the rest of those heaps.’
‘Yeah!’ said the Dean, now in the grip of a wild, unwizardly machismo.‘We’re mean! Yeah! Are we mean?’
The Archchancellor raised his eyebrows, and then turned to the rest of the wizards.
‘Are we mean?’ he said.
‘Er. I’m feeling reasonably mean,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘I’m definitely very mean, I think,’ said the Bursar.
‘It’s having no boots that does it,’ he added.
‘I’ll be mean if everyone else is,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
The Archchancellor turned back to the Dean.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it appears that we are all mean.’
‘Yo!’ said the Dean.
‘Yo what?’ said Ridcully.
‘It’s not a yo what, it’s just a yo,’ said the Senior Wrangler, behind him.‘It’s a general street greeting and affirmative with convivial military ingroup and masculine bonding-ritual overtones.’
‘What? What? Like “jolly good”?’ said Ridcully.
‘I suppose so,’ said the Senior Wrangler, reluctantly.
Ridcully was pleased. Ankh-Morpork had never offered very good prospects for hunting. He’d never