‘Thank you,’ said Arthur Winkings.
‘All your own, are they?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Amazing. Of course, I expect you brush regularly.’
‘Yes?’
‘Hygienic. That’s the important thing.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ said Ludmilla.
‘Well, we’ll just go and fetch him out, ‘ said Ridcully.
What was it about the girl? He felt a strange urge to pat her on the head.‘We’ll get some magic and get him out. Yes. Dean !’
‘Yo!’
‘We ‘re just going to go in there to get Windle out.’
‘Yo!’
‘What?’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘You must be out of your mind!’
Ridcully tried to look as dignified as possible, given his situation.
‘Remember that I am your Archchancellor,’ he snapped.
‘Then you must be out of your mind, Archchancellor!’ said the Senior Wrangler. He lowered his voice. ‘Anyway, he’s an undead. I don’t see how you can save undeads. It’s a sort of contradiction in terms.’
‘A dichotomy, ‘ said the Bursar helpfully.
‘Oh, I don’t think surgery is involved.’
‘Anyway, didn’t we bury him?’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘And now we dig him up again,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘It’s probably a miracle of existence.’
‘Like pickles,’ said the Bursar, happily.
Even the Fresh Starters went blank.
‘They do that in parts of Howondaland,’ said the Bursar.‘They make these big, big jars of special pickles and then they bury them in the ground for months to ferment and they get this lovely piquant -‘
‘Tell me,’ Ludmilla whispered to Ridcully, ‘is this how wizards usually behave?’
‘The Senior Wrangler is an amazingly fine example,’ said Ridcully. ‘Got the same urgent grasp of reality as a cardboard cut-out. Proud to have him on the team.’ He rubbed his hands together.‘OK, lads. Volunteers?’
‘Yo! Hut!’ said the Dean, who was in an entirely different world now.
‘I would be remiss in my duty if I failed to help a brother,’ said Reg Shoe.
‘Oook.’
‘You? We can’t take you,’ said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. ‘You don ‘t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.’
‘Oook!’ said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean.
‘Four of us should be enough,’ said the Archchancellor.
‘I’ve never even heard him say “Yo”,’ muttered the Dean.
He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn’t ordinarily do unless he’s about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around his forehead.
‘It’s part of the ethos,’ he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken question. ‘That’s what the warriors on the Counter-weight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout -‘ He tried to remember some far-off reading.’- er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!’
‘I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
The Dean hesitated. He wasn’t too sure himself, if it came to it. But a good wizard never let uncertainty stand in his way.
‘No, it’s definitely got to be bonsai,’ he said. He considered it some more and then brightened up. ‘On account of it all being part of bushido. Like … small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it.’
‘But you can’t shout “bonsai!” here,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. ‘We’ve got a totally different cultural background. It’d be useless. No-one will know what you mean.’
‘I’ll work on it,’ said the Dean.
He noticed Ludmilla standing with her mouth open.
‘This is wizard talk,’ he said.
‘It is, isn’t it,’ said Ludmilla. ‘I never would have guessed.’
The Archchancellor had got out of the trolley and was wheeling it experimentally back and forth. It usually took quite a long time for a fresh idea to fully lodge in Ridcully’s mind, but he felt instinctively that
there were all sorts of uses for a wire basket on four wheels.
‘Are we going or are we standin’ around all night bandagin’ our heads?’ he said.
‘Yo!’ snapped the Dean.
‘Yo?’ said Reg Shoe.
‘Oook!’
‘Was that a yo?’ said the Dean, suspiciously.
‘Oook.’
‘Well … all right, then.’
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off any more clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No spectres haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly-wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only haemorrhoids but frostbitten haemorrhoids.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.
Death sat on the cairn and ran a stone down the blade of his scythe in long, deliberate strokes.
There was a movement of air. Three grey servants popped into existence.
One said, You think you have won?
One said, You think you have triumphed?
Death turned the stone in his hand, to get a fresh surface. and brought it slowly down the length of the blade.
One said, We will inform Azrael.
One said, You are only, after all, a little Death.
Death held the blade up to the moonlight, twisting it this way and that, noting the play of light on the tiny flecks of metal on its edge.
Then he stood up, in one quick movement. The servants backed away hurriedly.
He reached out with the speed of a snake and grasped a robe, pulling its empty hood level with his eye sockets.
DO YOU KNOW WHY THE PRISONER IN THE TOWER WATCHES THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS? he said.
It said, Take your hands off me … oops …
Blue flame flared for a moment.
Death lowered his hand and looked around at the other two.
One said, You haven’t heard the last of this.
They vanished.
Death brushed a speck of ash off his robe, and then planted his feet squarely on the mountaintop. He raised the scythe over his head in both hands, and summoned all the lesser Deaths that had arisen in his absence.
After a while they streamed up the mountain in a faint black wave.
They flowed together like dark mercury.
It went on for a long time and then stopped.
Death lowered the scythe, and examined himself. Yes, all there. Once again, he was the Death, containing all the deaths of the world. Except for –
For a moment he hesitated. There was one tiny area of emptiness somewhere, some fragment of his soul, something unaccounted for …
He couldn’t be quite certain what it was.
He shrugged. Doubtless he’d find out. In the meantime, there was a lot of work to be done …
He rode away.
Far off, in his den under the barn, the Death of Rats relaxed his determined grip on a beam.
Windle Poons brought both feet down heavily on a tentacle snaking out from under the tiles, and lurched off through the steam. A slab of marble smashed down, showering him with fragments. Then he kicked the wall, savagely.
There was very probably no way out now, he realised, and even if there was he couldn’t find it. Anyway, he was already inside the thing. It was shaking its own walls down in an effort to get at him. At least he could give it a really bad case of indigestion.
He headed towards an orifice that had once been the entrance to a wide passage, and dived awkwardly through it just before it snapped shut. Silver fire crackled over the walls. There was so much life here it couldn’t be contained.
There were a few trolleys still here, skittering madly across the shaking floor, as lost as Windle.
He set off along another likely-looking corridor, although most corridors he’d been down in the last one hundred and thirty years hadn’t pulsated and dripped so much.
Another tentacle thrust through the wall and tripped him up.
Of course, it couldn’t kill him. But it could make him bodiless. Like old One-Man-Bucket. A fate worse than death, probably.
He pulled himself up. The ceiling bounced down on him, flattening him against the floor.
He counted under his breath and scampered forward. Steam washed over him.
He slipped again, and thrust out his hands.
He could feel himself losing control. There were too many things to operate. Never mind the spleen, just keeping heart and lungs going was taking too much effort…
‘Topiary !’
‘What the heck do you mean?’
‘Topiary! Get it? Yo!’
‘Oook!’
Windle looked up through foggy eyes.
Ah. Obviously he was losing control of his brain, too.
A trolley came sideways out of the steam with shadowy figures clinging on to its sides. One hairy arm and