‘And if he’s any problem,’ the wizards had added, in the privacy of their own heads, ‘anyone who talks to trees should be no trouble to get rid of.’
And then he’d arrived, and it turned out that Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was, ‘Winged you, yer bastard!’
The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They’d got so good at patternrecognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they’d run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.
Within twelve hours of arriving, Ridcully had installed a pack of hunting dragons in the butler’s pantry, fired his dreadful crossbow at the ravens on the ancient Tower of Art, drunk a dozen bottles of red wine, and rolled off to bed at two in the morning singing a song with words in it that some of the older and more forgetful wizards had to look up.
And then he got up at five o’clock to go duck hunting down in the marshes on the estuary.
And came back complaining that there wasn’t a good trout fishin’ river for miles. (You couldn’t fish in the river Ankh; you had to jump up and down on the hooks even to make them sink.)
And he ordered beer with his breakfast.
And told jokes.
On the other hand, thought the Bursar, at least he didn’t interfere with the actual running of the University. Ridcully the Brown wasn’t the least interested in running anything except maybe a string of hounds. If you couldn’t shoot arrows at it, hunt it or hook it, he couldn’t see much point in it.
Beer at breakfast! The Bursar shuddered. Wizards weren’t at their best before noon, and breakfast in the Great Hall was a quiet, fragile occasion, broken only by coughs, the quiet shuffling of the servants, and the occasional groan. People shouting for kidneys and black pudding and beer were a new phenomenon.
The only person not terrified of the ghastly man was old Windle Poons, who was one hundred and thirty years old and deaf and, while an expert on ancient magical writings, needed adequate. notice and a good run-up to deal with the present day. He’d managed to absorb the fact that the new Archchancellor was going to be one of those hedgerow-and-dickie-bird chappies, it would take a week or two for him to grasp the change of events, and in the meantime he made polite and civilized conversation based on what little he could remember about Nature and things.
On the lines of:
‘I expect it must be a, mm, a change for you, mm, sleeping in a real bed, instead of under the, mm, stars?’ And: ‘These things, mm, here, are called knives and forks, mm.’ And: ‘This, mm, green stuff on the scrambled egg, mm, would it be parsley, do you think?’
But since the new Archchancellor never paid much attention to anything anyone said while he was eating, and Poons never noticed that he wasn’t getting any answers, they got along quite well.
Anyway, the Bursar had other problems.
The Alchemists, for one thing. You couldn’t trust alchemists. They were too serious-minded.
Boom.
And that was the last one. Whole days went by without being punctuated by small explosions. The city settled down again, which was a foolish thing to do.
What the Bursar failed to consider was that no more bangs doesn’t mean they’ve stopped doing it, whatever it is. It just means they’re doing it right.
It was midnight. The surf boomed on the beach, and made a phosphorescent glow in the night. Around the ancient hill, though, the sound seemed as dead as if it was arriving through several layers of velvet.
The hole in the sand was quite big now.
If you could put your ear to it, you might think you could hear applause.
It was still midnight. A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.
The Alchemists’ Guildhall was new. It was always new. It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.
On this night a number of muffled figures entered the building in a surreptitious fashion. After a few minutes the lights in a window on the top floor dimmed and went out.
Well, nearly out.
Something was happening up there. A strange flickering filled the window, very briefly. It was followed by a ragged cheering.
And there was a noise. Not a bang this time, but a strange mechanical purring, like a happy cat at the bottom of a tin drum.
It went clickaclickaclickaclicka . . . click.
It went on for several minutes, to a background of cheers. And then a voice said:
‘That’s all, folks.’
‘That’s all what?’ said the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, next morning.
The man in front of him shivered with fear.
‘Don’t know, lordship,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.’
He twisted his forgers together nervously. The Patrician’s stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.
Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists’ Guild. He had once had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy.[3]
‘That’s all, lordship,’ he whined. ‘There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.’
‘Wrong? How?’
‘Er. Dunno, sir. just wrong, they said. They ought to go somewhere where it was better, they said. Uh. And they told me to go and get them some food.’
The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.
‘Indeed,’ he said.
‘But they’d had their supper only fifteen minutes before,’ the servant blurted out.
‘Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,’ said the Patrician.
‘Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.’
‘Indeed.’ The Patrician looked down at the paperwork on his desk. ‘Thank you. You may go.’
‘You know what, lordship? They liked them. They actually liked them!’
That the Alchemists had a Guild at all was remarkable. Wizards were just as unco-operative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn’t have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.
Whereas every alchemist was an alchemist alone, working in darkened rooms or hidden cellars and endlessly searching for the big casino – the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life. They tended to be thin, pink-eyed men, with beards that weren’t really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection, and many of them had that vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of boiling mercury.
It wasn’t that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn’t notice them, or thought they were walruses.
And so their tiny, despised Guild had never aspired to the powerful status of the Guilds of, say, the Thieves or the Beggars or the Assassins, but devoted itself instead to the aid of widows and families of those alchemists who had taken an overly relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide, for example, or had distilled some interesting fungi, drunk the result, and then stepped off the roof to play with the fairies. There weren’t actually very many widows and orphans, of course, because alchemists found it difficult to relate to other people long enough, and generally if they ever managed to marry it was only to have someone to hold their crucibles.
By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.
Until now . . .
Now they were full of the nervous excitement of those who have found an unexpected fortune in their bank account and don’t know whether to draw people’s attention to it or simply take the lot and run.
‘The wizards aren’t going to like it,’ said one of them, a thin, hesitant man called Lully. ‘They’re going to call it magic. You know they get really pissed if they think you’re doing magic and you’re not a wizard.’