The desert was silent. It wasn’t normally silent. It was normally alive with the chirruping of crickets, the buzz of mosquitoes, the hiss and whisper of hunting wings skimming across the cooling sands. But tonight it was silent with the thick, busy silence of dozens of nomads folding their tents and getting the hell out of it.
‘I promised my mother,’ said the boy. ‘I get these colds, you see.’
‘Perhaps you should try wearing, well, a bit more clothing?’
‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. You’ve got to wear all this leather stuff.’
‘I wouldn’t call it all,’ said Rincewind. ‘There’s not enough of it to call it all. Why have you got to wear it?’
‘So people know I’m a barbarian hero, of course.’
Rincewind leaned his back against the fetid walls of the snake pit and stared at the boy. He looked at two eyes like boiled grapes, a shock of ginger hair, and a face that was a battleground between its native freckles and the dreadful invading forces of acne.
Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.
‘Barbarian hero,’ he murmured.
‘It’s all right, isn’t it? All this leather stuff was very expensive.’
‘Yes, but, look – what’s your name, lad?’
‘Nijel-’
‘You see, Nijel
‘Nijel the Destroyer,’ Nijel added.
‘You see, Nijel
‘- the Destroyer-’
‘All right, the Destroyer-’ said Rincewind desperately. ‘- son of Harebut the Provision Merchant-’
‘What?’
‘You’ve got to be the son of someone,’ Nijel explained. ‘It says it here somewhere-’ He half-turned and fumbled inside a grubby fur bag, eventually bringing out a thin, torn and grubby book.
‘There’s a bit in here about selecting your name,’ he muttered.
‘How come you ended up in this pit, then?’
‘I was intending to steal from Creosote’s treasury, but I had an asthma attack,’ said Nijel, still fumbling through the crackling pages.
Rincewind looked down at the snake, which was still trying to keep out of everyone’s way. It had a good thing going in the pit, and knew trouble when it saw it. It wasn’t about to cause any aggro for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.
‘How long have you been a barbarian hero?’
‘I’m just getting started. I’ve always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along.’ Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’
‘It’s a desperate sort of life, by all accounts,’ Rincewind volunteered.
‘Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?’ Nijel muttered darkly.
Rincewind thought.
‘Is lettuce involved?’ he said.
‘Oh yes,’ said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.
Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do.
‘Do you know any lamp-wick jokes?’ he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.
‘I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp-wick?’
‘This slab moves,’ said Nijel. ‘Look, it’s a sort of door. Give me a hand.’
He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.
‘I expect it’s some sort of secret passage,’ he added. ‘Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It’s stuck.’
‘Don’t you want to hear the rest of the joke?’ said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.
‘I think not right at the moment,’ said Nijel. ‘I think I would prefer a bit of magical assistance.’
‘I’m not very good at it,’ said Rincewind. ‘Never got the hang of it, see, it’s more than just pointing a finger at it and saying “Kazam-” ‘
There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smashing it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.
After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.
‘Yes,’ he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. ‘Well. Very good. We’ll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going.’
He cleared his throat a bit.
‘Nnh,’ said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm’s length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn’t got longer arms.
Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.
‘It seems to open into some kind of room,’ he said.
‘Nnh.’
‘After you,’ said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.
The wizard staggered forward, bumped his head on the rock and didn’t appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.
Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. ‘Can you feel something?’ he said. ‘Should the stone be trembling?’
‘Nnh.’
Are you all right?’
‘Nnh.’
Nijel put his ear to the stones. ‘There’s a very strange noise,’ he said. A sort of humming.’ A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.
Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.
Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noises and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.
If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.
A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.
Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and bumped into him standing, surrounded by an octarine corona, in another cave.
Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flashing eyes and floating hair.
He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.
Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.
‘I say,’ said Nijel, ‘are you all right?’
‘Nnh,’ said Rincewind, and the syllable turned into a large doughnut.
‘You don’t look all right,’ said Nijel with what might be called, in the circumstances, unusual perspicacity.
‘Nnh.’
‘Why not try getting us out of here?’ Nijel added, and wisely flung himself flat on the floor.
Rincewind nodded like a puppet and pointed his loaded digit at the ceiling, which melted like ice under a blowlamp.
Still the rumbling went on, sending its disquieting harmonics dancing through the palace. It is a well-known factoid that there are frequencies that can cause panic, and frequencies that can cause embarrassing incontinence, but the shaking rock was resonating at the frequency that causes reality to melt and run out at the corners.
Nijel regarded the dripping ceiling and cautiously tasted it.
‘Lime custard,’ he said, and added, ‘I suppose there’s no chance of stairs, is there?’
More fire burst from Rincewind’s ravaged fingers, coalescing into an almost perfect escalator, except that possibly no other moving staircase in the universe was floored with alligator skin.
Nijel grabbed the gently spinning wizard and leapt aboard.
Fortunately they had reached the top before the magic vanished, very suddenly.
Sprouting out of the centre of the palace, shattering rooftops like a mushroom bursting through an ancient pavement, was a white tower taller than any other building in Al Khali.
Huge double doors had opened at its base and out of them, striding along as though they owned the place, were dozens of wizards. Rincewind thought he could recognise a few faces, faces which he’d seen before bumbling vaguely in lecture theatres or peering amiably at the world in the University grounds. They weren’t faces built for evil. They didn’t have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.