Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backwards and forwards across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.
They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.
Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.
The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.
There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas.
He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for sometime until the end fell off.
Then he ate it.
‘We shouldn’t have let him go like that,’ said Conina.
‘How could we have stopped him, oh, beauteous doeeyed eaglet?’
‘But he may do something stupid!’
‘I should think that is very likely,’ said Creosote primly.
‘While we do something clever and sit on a baking beach with nothing to eat or drink, is that it?’
‘You could tell me a story,’ said Creosote, trembling slightly.
‘Shut up.’
The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.
‘I suppose a quick anecdote is out of the question?’ he croaked.
Conina sighed. ‘There’s more to life than narrative, you know.’
‘Sorry. I lost control a little, there.’
Now that the sun was well up the crushed-shell beach glowed like a salt flat. The sea didn’t look any better by daylight. It moved like thin oil.
Away on either side the beach stretched in long, excruciatingly flat curves, supporting nothing but a few clumps of withered dune grass which lived off the moisture in the spray. There was no sign of any shade.
‘The way I see it,’ said Conina, ‘this is a beach, and that means sooner or later we’ll come to a river, so all we have to do is keep walking in one direction.’
‘And yet, delightful snow on the slopes of Mount Eritor, we do not know which one.’
Nijel sighed, and reached into his bag.
‘Erm,’ he said, ‘excuse me. Would this be any good? I stole it. Sorry.’
He held out the lamp that had been in the treasury.
‘It’s magic, isn’t it?’ he said hopefully. ‘I’ve heard about them, isn’t it worth a try?’
Creosote shook his head.
‘But you said your grandfather used it to make his fortune!’ said Conina.
‘A lamp,’ said the Seriph, ‘he used a lamp. Not this lamp. No, the real lamp was a battered old thing, and one day this wicked pedlar came round offering new lamps for old and my greatgrandmother gave it to him for this one. The family kept it in the vault as a sort of memorial to her. A truly stupid woman. It doesn’t work, of course.’
‘You tried it?’
‘No, but he wouldn’t have given it away if it was any good, would he?’
‘Give it a rub,’ said Conina. ‘It can’t do any harm.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ warned Creosote.
Nijel held the lamp gingerly. It had a strangely sleek look, as if someone had set out to make a lamp that could go fast.
He rubbed it.
The effects were curiously unimpressive. There was a half-hearted pop and a puff of wispy smoke near Nijel’s feet. A line appeared in the beach several feet away from the smoke. It spread quickly to outline a square of sand, which vanished.
A figure barrelled out of the beach, jerked to a stop, and groaned.
It was wearing a turban, an expensive tan, a small gold medallion, shiny shorts and advanced running shoes with curly toes.
It said, ‘I want to get this absolutely straight. Where am I?’
Conina recovered first.
‘It’s a beach,’ she said.
‘Yah,’ said the genie. ‘What I mean was, which lamp? What world?’
‘Don’t you know?’
The creature took the lamp out of Nijel’s unresisting grasp.
‘Oh, this old thing,’ he said. ‘I’m on time share. Two weeks every August but, of course, usually one can never get away.’
‘Got a lot of lamps, have you?’ said Nijel.
‘I am somewhat over-committed on lamps,’ the genie agreed. ‘In fact I am thinking of diversifying into rings. Rings are looking big at the moment. There’s a lot of movement in rings. Sorry, people; what can I do you for?’ The last phrase was turned in that special voice which people use for humorous self-parody, in the mistaken hope that it will make them sound less like a prat.
‘We-’ Conina began.
‘I want a drink,’ snapped Creosote. ‘And you are supposed to say that my wish is your command.’
‘Oh, absolutely no-one says that sort of thing any more,’ said the genie, and produced a glass out of nowhere. He treated Creosote to a brilliant smile lasting a small percentage of one second.
‘We want you to take us across the sea to Ankh-Morpork,’ said Conina firmly.
The genie looked blank. Then he pulled a very thick book[21] from the empty air and consulted it.
‘It sounds a really neat concept,’ he said eventually. ‘Let’s do lunch next Tuesday, okay?’
‘Do what?’
‘I’m a little energetic right now.’
‘You’re a little-?’ Conina began.
‘Great,’ said the genie, sincerely, and glanced at his wrist. ‘Hey, is that the time?’ He vanished.
The three of them looked at the lamp in thoughtful silence, and then Nijel said, ‘Whatever happened to, you know, the fat guys with the baggy trousers and I Hear And Obey O Master?’
Creosote snarled. He’d just drunk his drink. It had turned out to be water with bubbles in it and a taste like warm flatirons.
‘I’m bloody well not standing for it,’ snarled Conina. She snatched the lamp from his hand and rubbed it as if she was sorry she wasn’t holding a handful of emery cloth.
The genie reappeared at a different spot, which still managed to be several feet away from the weak explosion and obligatory cloud of smoke.
He was now holding something curved and shiny to his ear, and listening intently. He looked hurriedly at Conina’s angry face and contrived to suggest, by waggling his eyebrows and waving his free hand urgently, that he was currently and inconveniently tied up by irksome matters which, regretfully, prevented him giving her his full attention as of now but, as soon as he had disentangled himself from this importunate person, she could rest assured that her wish, which was certainly a wish of tone and brilliance, would be his command.
‘I shall smash the lamp,’ she said quietly.
The genie flashed her a smile and spoke hastily into the thing he was cradling between his chin and his shoulder.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Great. It’s a slice, believe me. Have your people call my people. Stay beyond, okay? Bye.’ He lowered the instrument. ‘Bastard,’ he said vaguely.
‘I really shall smash the lamp,’ said Conina.
‘Which lamp is this?’ said the genie hurriedly.
‘How many have you got?’ said Nijel. ‘I always thought genies had just the one.’
The genie explained wearily that in fact he had several lamps. There was a small but well-appointed lamp where he lived during the week, another rather unique lamp in the country, a carefully restored peasant rushlight in an unspoilt winegrowing district near Quirm, and just recently a set of derelict lamps in the docks area of Ankh-Morpork that had great potential, once the smart crowd got there, to become the occult equivalent of a suite of offices and a wine bar.
They listened in awe, like fish who had inadvertently swum into a lecture on how to fly.
‘Who are your people the other people have got to call?’ said Nijel, who was impressed, although he didn’t know why or by what.
‘Actually, I don’t have any people yet,’ said the genie, and gave a grimace that was definitely upwardly-mobile at the corners. ‘But I will.’
‘Everyone shut up,’ said Conina firmly, ‘and you, take us to Ankh-Morpork.’
‘I should, if I were you,’ said Creosote. ‘When the young lady’s mouth looks like a letter box, it’s best to do what she says.’
The genie hesitated.
‘I’m not very deep on transport,’ he said.
‘Learn,’ said Conina. She was tossing the lamp from hand to hand.
‘Teleportation is a major headache,’ said the genie, looking desperate. ‘Why don’t we do lun-’
‘Right, that’s it,’ said Conina. ‘Now I just need a couple of big flat rocks-’
‘Okay, okay. Just hold hands, will you? I’ll give it my best shot, but this could be one big mistake-‘
The astro-philosophers of Krull once succeeded in proving conclusively that all places are one place and that the distance between them is an illusion, and this news was an embarrassment to all thinking philosophers because it did not explain, among other things, signposts. After years of wrangling the whole thing was then turned over to Ly Tin Wheedle, arguably the Disc’s greatest philosopher[22], who after some thought proclaimed that although it was indeed true that all places were one place, that place was very large.