‘This isn’t right—’ said Rincewind.
Plink.
They spotted the source of the noise eventually. A tiny trickle was making its way down the side of the stalactite and forming droplets that fell a few feet to the stalagmite.
Another drop formed while they watched, and hung there.
One of the wizards clambered up the dry slope and peered at it.
‘It’s not moving,’ he said. ‘The trickle’s drying up. I think . . . it’s evaporating.’
The Archchancellor turned to Rincewind. ‘Well, we’ve followed you this far, mate,’ he said. ‘What now?’
‘I think I could do with another b—’
‘There’s none left, mate.’
Rincewind looked desperately around the cave, and then at the huge translucent mass of limestone in front of him.
It was definitely pointy. It was also in the centre of the cave. It had a certain inevitability about it.
Odd, really, that something like this would form down here, shining away like a pearl in an oyster. The ground trembled again. Up there, people would already be getting thirsty, cursing the windmills as only an Ecksian could curse. The water was gone and that was very bad, and when the beer ran out people would really get angry . . .
The wizards were all waiting for him to do something.
All right, start with the rock. What did he know about rocks and caves in these parts?
There was a curious freedom at a time like this. He was going to be in real trouble whatever he did, so he might as well give this a try . . .
‘I need some paint,’ he said.
‘What for?’
‘For what I need,’ said Rincewind.
‘There’s young Salid,’ said the Dean. ‘He’s a bit of an arty blager. Let’s go and kick his door down.’
‘And bring some more beer!’ Rincewind called after them.
Neilette patted Rincewind on the shoulder. ‘Are you going to do some magic?’ she said.
‘I don’t know if it counts as magic here,’ said Rincewind. ‘If it doesn’t work, stand well back.’
‘Is it going to be dangerous, then?’
‘No, I might have to start running without looking where I’m going. But . . . this rock’s warm. Have you noticed?’
She touched it. ‘I see what you mean . . .’
‘I was just thinking . . . Supposing someone was in a country who shouldn’t be there? What would it do?’
‘Oh, the Watch would catch him, I expect.’
‘No, no, not the people. What would the land do? I think I need another drink, it made more sense then . . .’
‘Okay, here we are, we couldn’t find much, but there’s some whitewash and some red paint and a tin of stuff which might be black paint or it could be tar oil.’ The wizards hurried up. ‘Not much in the way of brushes, though.’
Rincewind picked up a brush that looked as though it had once been used to whitewash a very rough wall and then to clean the teeth of some large creature, possibly a crocodile.
He’d never been any good at art, and this is a distinction quite hard to achieve in many education systems. Basic artistic skills and a familiarity with occult calligraphy are part of a wizard’s early training, yet in Rincewind’s fingers chalk broke and pencils shattered. It was probably due to a deep distrust of getting things down on paper when they were doing all right where they were.
Neilette handed him a tin of Funnelweb. Rincewind drank deeply and then dipped the brush in what might have been black paint and essayed a few upturned Vs on the rock, and some circles under the lines, with three dots in a V and a friendly little curve in each one.
He took another deep draught of the beer and saw what he was doing wrong. It was no good trying to be strictly true to life here; what he had to go for was an impression.
He sloshed wildly at the stone, humming madly under his breath.
‘Anyone guess what it is yet?’ he said, over his shoulder.
‘Looks a bit modern to me,’ said the Dean.
But Rincewind was into the swing of it now. Any fool could just copy what he saw, except possibly Rincewind, but surely the whole point was to try to paint a picture that moved, that definitely expressed the, the, the—
Definitely expressed it, anyway. You went the way the paint and the colour wanted you to go.
‘You know,’ said Neilette, ‘the way the light falls on it and everything . . . it could be a group of wizards . . .’
Rincewind half closed his eyes. Perhaps it was the way that the shadows moved, but he had to admit he’d done a really good job. He slapped some more paint on.
‘Looks like they’re almost coming out of the stone,’ said someone behind him, but the voice sounded muffled.
He felt as though he was falling into a hole. He’d had the sensation before, although usually it was when he was falling into a hole. The walls were fuzzy, as though they were streaking past him at a tremendous rate. The ground shook.
‘Are we moving?’ he said.
‘Feels like it, doesn’t it?’ said Archchancellor Rincewind. ‘But we’re standing still!’
‘Moving while standing still,’ muttered Rincewind, and giggled. ‘That’s a good one!’ He squinted happily at the beer can. ‘Y’know,’ he said, ‘I can’t stomach more than a pint or two of the ale we have at home but this stuff is like drinking lemonade! Has anyone got that meat pie—’
As loudly as a thunderstorm under the bed but as softly as two souffles colliding, past and present ran into one another.
They contained a lot of people.
‘What’s this?’
‘Dean?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re not the Dean!’
‘How dare you say that! Who are you!’
‘Ook!’
‘Stone the cows, there’s a monkey in here!’
‘No! No! I didn’t say that! He said that!’
‘Archchancellor?’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes?’
‘What? How many of you are there?’
The darkness became a deep purple, shading to violet.
‘Will you all stop shouting and listen to me!’
To Rincewind’s amazement, they did.
‘Look, the walls are getting closer! This place is trying not to exist!’
And, having done his duty to the community, he turned and ran over the shaking rock floor.
After a couple of seconds the Luggage passed him, which was always a bad sign.
He heard the voices behind him. Wizards had a hard job accepting the term ‘clear and present danger’. They liked the kind you could argue about. But there is something about a rapidly descending ceiling that intrudes into the awareness of even the most quarrelsome.
‘I’ll save you, Mrs Whitlow!’
‘Up the tunnel!’
‘How fast are those walls closing in, would you say?’
‘Shut up and run!’
Now Rincewind was passed by a large red, furry kangaroo. The Librarian’s erratic morphism, having briefly turned him into a red stalactite as an obviously successful shape for surviving in caves, had finally taken on board the fact that it would make for a terminally lengthy survival in a cave that was rapidly getting smaller, and had flipped into a local morphic field built for speed.
Man, Luggage and kangaroo piled through the hole into the cellar and ended in a heap against the opposite side.
There was a rumbling behind them and wizards and women were fired out into the cellar with some speed, several of them landing on Rincewind. Behind the wall, the rock groaned and creaked, expelling these alien things in what, Rincewind thought, was a geological chunder.
Something flew out of the hole and hit him on the ear, but this was only a minor problem compared to the meat pie, which came out trailing mushy peas and tomato sauce and hit him in the mouth.
It wasn’t, actually, all that bad.
The ability to ask questions like ‘Where am I and who is the “I” that is asking?’ is one of the things that distinguishes mankind from, say, cuttlefish.[23] The wizards from Unseen University, being perhaps the intellectual cream or certainly the cerebral yoghurt of their generation, passed through this stage within minutes. Wizards are very adept at certain ideas. One minute you’re arguing over the shape of a duck’s head and the next there are people telling you you’ve been inside a rock for thousands of years because time goes slower on the inside. This presents no great problem for a man who has found his way to the lavatory at Unseen University.[24]
There were more important questions as they sat round the table in BU.
‘Is there anything to eat?’ said Ridcully.
‘It’s the middle of the night, sir.’
‘You mean we missed dinner?’
‘Thousands of years of dinners, Archchancellor.’
‘Really? Better start catching up, then, Mister Stibbons. Still . . . nice little place you’ve got here . . . archchancellor.’
Ridcully pronounced the word very carefully in order to accentuate the lower case ‘a’.