‘Came up the hard way, did he?’ said Rincewind.
Conina spread the carpet on the floor. It had a complex pattern of golden dragons on a blue background. They were extremely complicated dragons, with long beards, ears and wings, and they seemed to be frozen in motion, caught in transition from one state to another, suggesting that the loom which wove them had rather more dimensions than the usual three, but the worst thing about it was that if you looked at it long enough the pattern became blue dragons on a gold background, and a terrible feeling stole over you that if you kept on trying to see both types of dragon at once your brains would trickle out of your ears.
Rincewind tore his gaze away with some difficulty as another distant explosion rocked the building.
‘How does it work?’ he said.
Creosote shrugged. ‘I’ve never used it,’ he said. ‘I suppose you just say “up” and “down” and things like that.’
‘How about “fly through the wall”?’ said Rincewind.
All three of them looked up at the high, dark and, above all, solid walls of the room.
‘We could try sitting on it and saying “rise”,’ Nijel volunteered. ‘And then, before we hit the roof, we could say, well, “stop”.’ He considered this for a bit, and then added, ‘If that’s the word.’
‘Or, “drop”,’ said Rincewind, ‘or “descend”, “dive”, “fall”, “sink”. Or “plunge”.’
“Plummet”,’ suggested Conina gloomily.
‘Of course,’ said Nijel, ‘with all this wild magic floating around, you could try using some of it.’
Ah-’ said Rincewind, and, ‘Well-’
‘You’ve got “wizzard” written on your hat,’ said Creosote.
‘Anyone can write things on their hat,’ said Conina. ‘You don’t want to believe everything you read.’
‘Now hold on a minute,’ said Rincewind hotly.
They held on a minute.
They held on for a further seventeen seconds.
‘Look, it’s a lot harder than you think,’ he said.
‘What did I tell you?’ said Conina. ‘Come on, let’s dig the mortar out with our fingernails.’
Rincewind waved her into silence, removed his hat, pointedly blew the dust off the star, put the hat on again, adjusted the brim, rolled up his sleeves, flexed his fingers and panicked.
In default of anything better to do, he leaned against the stone.
It was vibrating. It wasn’t that it was being shaken; it felt that the throbbing was coming from inside the wall.
It was very much the same sort of trembling he had felt back at the University, just before the sourcerer arrived. The stone was definitely very unhappy about something.
He sidled along the wall and put his ear to the next stone, which was a smaller, wedge-shaped stone cut to fit an angle of the wall, not a big, distinguished stone, but a bantam stone, patiently doing its bit for the greater good of the wall as a whole. It was also shaking.
‘Shh!’ said Conina.
‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Nijel loudly. Nijel was one of those people who, if you say “don’t look now”, would immediately swivel his head like an owl on a turntable. These are the same people who, when you point out, say, an unusual crocus just beside them, turn round aimlessly and put their foot down with a sad little squashy noise. If they were lost in a trackless desert you could find them by putting down, somewhere on the sand, something small and fragile like a valuable old mug that had been in your family for generations, and then hurrying back as soon as you heard the crash.
Anyway.
‘That’s the point! What happened to the war?’
A little cascade of mortar poured down from the ceiling on to Rincewind’s hat.
‘Something’s acting on the stones,’ he said quietly. ‘They’re trying to break free.’
‘We’re right underneath quite a lot of them,’ observed Creosote.
There was a grinding noise above them and a shaft of daylight lanced down. To Rincewind’s surprise it wasn’t accompanied by sudden death from crushing. There was another silicon creak, and the hole grew. The stones were falling out, and they were falling up.
‘I think,’ he said, ‘that the carpet might be worth a try at this point.’
The wall beside him shook itself like a dog and drifted apart, its masonry giving Rincewind several severe blows as it soared away.
The four of them landed on the blue and gold carpet in a storm of flying rock.
‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ said Nijel, keeping up his reputation for acute observation.
‘Hang on,’ said Rincewind. ‘I’ll say-’
‘You won’t,’ snapped Conina, kneeling beside him. ‘I’ll say. I don’t trust you.’
‘But you’ve-’
‘Shut up,’ said Conina. She patted the carpet.
‘Carpet – rise,’ she commanded.
There was a pause.
,Up.,
‘Perhaps it doesn’t understand the language,’ said Nijel.
‘Lift. Levitate. Fly.’
‘Or it could be, say, sensitive to one particular voice-’
‘Shut. Up.’
‘You tried up,’ said Nijel. ‘Try ascend.’
‘Or soar,’ said Creosote. Several tons of flagstone swooped past an inch from his head.
‘If it was going to answer to them it would have done, wouldn’t it?’ said Conina. The air round her was thick with dust as the flying stones ground together. She thumped the carpet.
‘Take off, you blasted mat! Arrgh!’
A piece of cornice clipped her shoulder. She rubbed the bruise irritably, and turned to Rincewind, who was sitting with his knees under his chin and his hat pulled down over his head.
‘Why doesn’t it work?’ she said.
‘You’re not saying the right words,’ he said.
‘It doesn’t understand the language?’
‘Language hasn’t got anything to do with it. You’ve neglected something fundamental.’
‘Well?’
‘Well what?’ sniffed Rincewind.
‘Look, this isn’t the time to stand on your dignity!’
‘You keep on trying, don’t you mind me.’
‘Make it fly!’
Rincewind pulled his hat further over his ears.
‘Please?’ said Conina.
The hat rose a bit.
‘Wed all be terribly bucked,’ said Nijel.
‘Hear, hear,’ said Creosote.
The hat rose some more. ‘You’re quite sure?’ said Rincewind.
‘Yes!’
Rincewind cleared his throat.
‘Down,’ he commanded.
The carpet rose from the ground and hovered expectantly a few feet over the dust.
‘How did-’ Conina began, but Nijel interrupted her.
‘Wizards are privy to arcane knowledge, that’s probably what it is,’ he said. ‘Probably the carpet’s got a geas on it to do the opposite of anything that’s said. Can you make it go up further?’
‘Yes, but I’m not going to,’ said Rincewind. The carpet drifted slowly forward and, as happens so often at times like this, a rolling of masonry bounced right across the spot where it had lain.
A moment later they were out in the open air, the storm of stone behind them.
The palace was pulling itself to pieces, and the pieces were funnelling up into the air like a volcanic eruption in reverse. The sourcerous tower had completely disappeared, but the stones were dancing towards the spot where it had stood and …
‘They’re building another tower!’ said Nijel.
‘Out of my palace, too,’ said Creosote.
‘The hat’s won,’ said Rincewind. ‘That’s why it’s building its own tower. It’s a sort of reaction. Wizards always used to build a tower around themselves, like those … what do you call those things you find at the bottom of rivers?’
‘Frogs.’
‘Stones.’
‘Unsuccessful gangsters.’
‘Caddis flies is what I meant,’ said Rincewind. ‘When a wizard set out to fight, the first thing he always did was build a tower.’
‘It’s very big,’ said Nijel.
Rincewind nodded glumly.
‘Where are we going?’ said Conina.
Rincewind shrugged.
‘Away,’ he said.
The outer palace wall drifted just below them. As they passed over it began to shake, and small bricks began to loop towards the storm of flying rock that buzzed around the new tower.
Eventually Conina said, ‘All right. How did you get the carpet to fly? Does it really do the opposite of what you command?’
‘No. I just paid attention to certain fundamental details of laminar and spatial arrangements.’
‘You’ve lost me there,’ she admitted.
‘You want it in non-wizard talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘You put it on the floor upside down,’ said Rincewind.
Conina sat very still for a while. Then she said, ‘I must say this is very comfortable. It’s the first time I’ve ever flown on a carpet.’
‘It’s the first time I’ve ever flown one,’ said Rincewind vaguely.
‘You do it very well,’ she said.
‘Thank you.’
‘You said you were frightened of heights.’
‘Terrified.’
‘You don’t show it.’
‘I’m not thinking about it.’
Rincewind turned and looked at the tower behind them. It had grown quite a lot in the last minute, blossoming at the top into a complexity of turrets and battlements. A swarm of tiles was hovering over it, individual tiles swooping down and clinking into place like ceramic bees on a bombing run. It was impossibly high – the stones at the bottom would have been crushed if it wasn’t for the magic that crackled through them.