Every so often a ruler of the city builds a wall around Ankh-Morpork, ostensibly to keep enemies out. But Ankh-Morpork doesn’t fear enemies. In fact it welcomes enemies, provided they are enemies with money to spend.[2] It has survived flood, fire, hordes, revolutions and dragons. Sometimes by accident, admittedly, but it has survived them. The cheerful and irrecoverably venal spirit of the city has been proof against anything . . .
Until now.
Boom.
The explosion removed the windows, the door and most of the chimney.
It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.
Explosions were part of the scenery, such as was left.
And this one was pretty good, even by the standards of local connoisseurs. There was a deep red heart to the billowing black smoke which you didn’t often see. The bits of semi-molten brickwork were more molten than usual. It was, they considered, quite impressive.
Boom.
A minute or two after the explosion a figure lurched out of the ragged hole where the door had been. It had no hair, and what clothes it still had were on fire.
It staggered up to the small crowd that was admiring the devastation and by chance laid a sooty hand on a hot-meat-pie-and-sausage-in-a-bun salesman called Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, who had an almost magical ability to turn up wherever a sale might be made.
‘Looking,’ it said, in a dreamy, stunned voice, ‘f’r a word. Tip of my tongue.’
‘Blister?’ volunteered Throat.
He recovered his commercial senses. ‘After an experience like that,’ he added, proffering a pastry case full of so much reclaimed organic debris that it was very nearly sapient, ‘what you need is to get a hot meat pie inside you-‘
‘Nonono. ‘S not blister. ‘S what you say when you’ve discovered something. You goes running out into the street shoutin’,’ said the smouldering figure urgently. ‘S’pecial word,’ it added, its brow creasing under the soot.
The crowd, reluctantly satisfied that there were going to be no more explosions, gathered around. This might be nearly as good.
‘Yeah, that’s right,’ said an elderly man, filling his pipe. ‘You runs out shouting “Fire! Fire!” ‘ He looked triumphant.
‘ ‘S not that . . . ‘
‘Or “Help!” or-‘
‘No, he’s right,’ said a woman with a basket of fish on her head. ‘There’s a special word. It’s foreign.’
‘Right, right,’ said her neighbour. ‘Special foreign word for people who’ve discovered something. It was invented by some foreign bugger in his bath-‘
‘Well,’ said the pipe man, lighting it off the alchemist’s smouldering hat, ‘I for one don’t see why people in this city need to go round shouting heathen lingo just ‘cos they’ve had a bath. Anyway, look at him. He ain’t had a bath. He needs a bath, yes, but he ain’t had one. What’s he want to go round shouting foreign lingo for? We’ve got perfectly satisfactory words for shoutin’.’
‘Like what?’ said Cut-me-own-Throat:
The pipe-smoker hesitated. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘like . . . “I’ve discovered something” . . . or . . . “Hooray” . . . ‘
‘No, I’m thinking about the bugger over Tsort way, or somewhere. He was in his bath and he had this idea for something, and he ran out down the street yelling.’
‘Yelling what?’
‘Dunno. P’raps “Give me a towel!” ‘
‘Bet he’d be yellin’ all right if he tried that sort of thing round here,’ said Throat cheerfully. ‘Now, ladies and gents, I have here some sausage in a bun that’d make your-‘
‘Eureka,’ said the soot-coloured one, swaying back and forth.
‘What about it?’ said Throat.
‘No, that’s the word. Eureka.’ A worried grin spread across the black features. ‘It means “I have it”.’
‘Have what?’ said Throat.
‘It. At least, I had it. Octo-cellulose. Amazing stuff. Had it in my hand. But I held it too close to the fire,’ said the figure, in the perplexed tones of the nearly concussed. ‘V’ry important fact. Mus’ make a note of it. Don’t let it get hot. V’ry important. Mus’ write down v’ry important fact.’
He tottered back into the smoking ruins.
Dibbler watched him go.
‘Wonder what that was all about?’ he said. Then he shrugged and raised his voice to a shout. ‘Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h’an’t noticed they’re gone!’
The glittering, swirling idea from the hill had watched all this. The alchemist didn’t even know it was there. All he knew was that he was being unusually inventive today.
Now it had spotted the pie merchant’s mind.
It knew that kind of mind. It loved minds like that. A mind that could sell nightmare pies could sell dreams.
It leaped.
On a hill far away the breeze stirred the cold, grey ash.
Further down the hill, in a crack in a hollow between two rocks where a dwarf juniper bush struggled for a Ping, a little trickle of sand began to move.
Boom.
A fine film of plaster dust drifted down on to the desk of Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor of Unseen University; just as he was trying to tie a particularly difficult fly.
He glanced out of the stained-glass window. A smoke cloud was rising over uptown Morpork.
‘Bursaar!’
The Bursar arrived within a few seconds, out of breath. Loud noises always upset him.
‘It’s the alchemists, Master,’ he panted.
‘That’s the third time this week. Blasted firework merchants,’ muttered the Archchancellor.
‘I’m afraid so, Master,’ said the Bursar.
‘What do they think they’re doing?’
‘I really couldn’t say, Master,’ said the Bursar, getting his breath back. ‘Alchemy has never interested me. It’s altogether too . . . too . . . ‘
‘Dangerous,’ said the Archchancellor firmly. ‘Lot of damn mixin’ things up and saying, hey, what’ll happen if we add a drop of the yellow stuff, and then goin’ around without yer eyebrows for a fortnight.’
‘I was going to say impractical,’ said the Bursar. ‘Trying to do things the hard way when we have perfectly simple everyday magic available.’
‘I thought they were trying to cure the philosopher’s stones, or somethin’,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘Lot of damn nonsense, if you ask me. Anyway, I’m off.’
As the Archchancellor began to sidle out of the room the Bursar hastily waved a handful of papers at him.
‘Before you go, Archchancellor,’ he said desperately, ‘I wonder if you would just care to sign a few-‘
‘Not now, man,’ snapped the Archchancellor. ‘Got to see a man about a horse, what?’
‘What?’
‘Right.’ The door closed.
The Bursar stared at it, and sighed.
Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones – they’d come, they’d served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they’d died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of longterm employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
However, from the Bursar’s point of view this didn’t really have to matter. The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor and the Archchancellor’s most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar’s point of view, without reading them first.
This one was different. For one thing, he was hardly ever in, except to change out of his muddy clothes. And he shouted at people. Usually at the Bursar.
And yet, at the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn’t set foot in the University in forty years.
There had been so much in-fighting between the various orders of wizardry in recent years that, just for once, the senior wizards had agreed that what the University needed was a period of stability, so that they could get on with their scheming and intriguing in peace and quiet for a few months. A search of the records turned up Ridcully the Brown who, after becoming a Seventh Level mage at the incredibly young age of twenty-seven, had quit the University in order to look after his family’s estates deep in the country.
He looked ideal.
‘Just the chap,’ they all said. ‘Clean sweep. New broom. A country wizard. Back to the thingumajigs, the roots of wizardry. Jolly old boy with a pipe and twinkly eyes. Sort of chap who can tell one herb from another, roams-the-high-forest-with-every-beast-his-brother kind of thing. Sleeps under the stars, like as not. Knows what the wind is saying, we shouldn’t wonder. Got a name for all the trees, you can bank on it. Speaks to the birds, too.’
A messenger had been sent. Ridcully the Brown had sighed, cursed a bit, found his staff in the kitchen garden where it had been supporting a scarecrow, and had set out.