‘N-no,’ said the leader. ‘It’s too regular. Perhaps it’s a messenger?’
It was louder now, a crisp rhythm like someone eating celery very fast.
‘I’ll send up a flare,’ said the leader. He picked up a handful of snow, rolled it into a ball, threw it up into the air and ignited it with a stream of octarine fire from his fingertips. There was a brief, fierce blue glare.
There was silence. Then another wizard said, ‘You daft bugger, I can’t see a thing now.’
That was the last thing they heard before something fast, hard and noisy cannoned into them out of the darkness and vanished into the night.
When they dug one another out of the snow all they could find was a tight pressed trail of little footprints. Hundreds of little footprints, all very close together and heading across the snow as straight as a searchlight.
‘A necromancer!’ said Rincewind.
The old woman across the fire shrugged and pulled a pack of greasy cards from some unseen pocket.
Despite the deep frost outside, the atmosphere inside the yurt was like a blacksmith’s armpit and the wizard was already sweating heavily. Horse dung made a good fuel, but the Horse People had a lot to learn about air conditioning, starting with what it meant.
Bethan leaned sideways.
‘What’s neck romance?’ she whispered.
‘Necromancy. Talking to the dead,’ he explained.
‘Oh,’ she said, vaguely disappointed.
They had dined on horse meat, horse cheese, horse black pudding, horse d’oeuvres and a thin beer that Rincewind didn’t want to speculate about. Cohen (who’d ad horse soup) explained that the Horse Tribes of the Hubland steppes were born in the saddle, which Rincewind considered was a gynaecological impossibility, and they were particularly adept at natural magic, since life on the open steppe makes you realise how neatly the sky fits the land all around the edges and this naturally inspires the mind to deep thoughts like ‘Why?’, ‘When?’ and ‘Why don’t we try beef for a change?’
The chieftain’s grandmother nodded at Rincewind and spread the cards in front of her.
Rincewind, as it has already been noted, was the worst wizard on the Disc: no other spells would stay in his mind once the Spell had lodged in there, in much the same way that fish don’t hang around in a pike pool. But he still had his pride, and wizards don’t like to see women perform even simple magic. Unseen University had never admitted women, muttering something about problems with the plumbing, but the real reason was an unspoken dread that if women were allowed to mess around with magic they would probably be embarrassingly good at it . . .
‘Anyway, I don’t believe in Caroc cards,’ he muttered, ‘All that stuff about it being the distilled wisdom of the universe is a load of rubbish.’
The first card, smoke-yellowed and age-crinkled, was . . .
It should have been The Star. But instead of the familiar round disc with crude little rays, it had become a tiny red dot. The old woman muttered and scratched at the card with a fingernail, then looked sharply at Rincewind.
‘Nothing to do with me,’ he said.
She turned up the Importance of Washing the Hands, the Eight of Octograms, the Dome of the Sky, the Pool of Night, the Four of Elephants, the Ace of Turtles, and – Rincewind had been expecting it – Death.
And something was wrong with Death, too. It should have been a fairly realistic drawing of Death on his white horse, and indeed He was still there. But the sky was red lit, and coming over a distant hill was a tiny figure. barely visible by the light of the horsefat lamps.
Rincewind didn’t have to identify it, because behind it was a box on hundreds of little legs.
The Luggage would follow its owner anywhere.
Rincewind looked across the tent to Twoflower, a pale shape on a pile of horsehides.
‘He’s really dead?’ he said. Cohen translated for the old woman, who shook her head. She reached down to a small wooden chest beside her and rummaged around in a collection of bags and bottles until she found a tiny green bottle which she tipped into Rincewind’s beer. He looked at it suspiciously.
‘She shays it’s sort of medicine,’ said Cohen. ‘I should drink it if I were you, theshe people get a bit upshet if you don’t accshept hoshpitality.’
‘It’s not going to blow my head off?’ said Rincewind.
‘She shays it’s esshential you drink it.’
‘Well, if you’re sure it’s okay. It can’t make the beer taste any worse.’
He took a swig, aware of all eyes on him.
‘Um,’ he said. ‘Actually, it’s not at all ba—’
Something picked him up and threw him into the air. Except that in another .sense he was still sitting by the fire – he could see himself there, a dwindling figure in the circle of firelight that was rapidly getting smaller. The toy figures around it were looking intently at his body. Except for the old woman. She was looking right up at , him, and grinning.
The Circle Sea’s senior wizards were not grinning at all. They were becoming aware that they were confronted with something entirely new and fearsome: a young man on the make.
Actually none of them were quite sure how old Trymion really was, but his sparse hair was still black and his skin had a waxy look to it that could be taken, in a poor light, to be the bloom of youth.
The six surviving heads of the Eight Orders sat at the long, shiny and new table in what had been Galder Weatherwax’s study and each one wondered precisely what it was about Trymon that made them want to kick him.
It wasn’t that he was ambitious and cruel. Cruel men were stupid; they all knew how to use cruel men, and they certainly knew how to bend other men’s ambitions. You didn’t stay an Eighth Level magus for long unless you were adept at a kind of mental judo.
It wasn’t that he was bloodthirsty, power-hungry or especially wicked. These things were not necessarily drawbacks in a wizard. The wizards were, on the whole, no more wicked than, say, the committee of the average Rotary Club, and each had risen to pre-eminence in his chosen profession not so much by skill at magic but by never neglecting to capitalise on the weaknesses of opponents.
It wasn’t that he was particularly wise. Every wizard considered himself a fairly hot property, wisewise; it went with the job.
It wasn’t even that he had charisma. They all knew charisma when they encountered it, and Trymon had all the charisma of a duck egg.
That was it, in fact . . .
He wasn’t good or evil or cruel or extreme in any way but one, which was that he had elevated greyness to the status of a fine art and cultivated a mind that was as bleak and pitiless and logical as the slopes of Hell.
And what was so strange was that each of the wizards, who had in the course of their work encountered many a fire-spitting, bat-winged, tiger-taloned entity in the privacy of a magical octogram, had never before had quite the same uncomfortable feeling as they had when, ten minutes late, Trymon strode into the room.
‘Sorry I’m late, gentlemen,’ he lied, rubbing his hands briskly. ‘So many things to do, so much to organise, I’m ure you know how it is.’
The wizards looked sidelong at one another as Trymon sat down at the head of the table and shuffled busily through some papers.
What happened to old Galder’s chair, the one with the lion arms and the chicken feet?’ said Jiglad Wert. It had gone, along with most of the other familiar furniture, and in its place were a number of low leather chairs that appeared to be incredibly comfortable until you’d sat in them for five minutes.
‘That? Oh, I had it burnt,’ said Trymon, not looking up.
‘Burnt? But it was a priceless magical artifact, a genuine—’
‘Just a piece of junk, I’m afraid,’ said Trymon, treating him to a fleeting smile. ‘I’m sure real wizards don’t really need that sort of thing, now if I may draw your attention to the business of the day—’
‘What’s this paper?’ said Jiglad Wert, of the Hood-winkers, waving the document that had been left in front of him, and waving it all the more forcefully because his own chair, back in his cluttered and comfortable tower, was if anything more ornate than Galder’s had been.
‘It’s an agenda, Jiglad,’ said Trymon, patiently.
‘And what does a gender do?’
‘It’s just a list of the things we’ve got to discuss. It’s very simple, I’m sorry if you feel that—’
‘We’ve never needed one before!’
‘I think perhaps you have needed one, you just haven’t used one,’ said Trymon, his voice resonant with reasonableness.