Gancia drew a long thin knife and leaned down close to Twoflower’s face.
‘She wants it open,’ he said. He looked up at the other man and grinned.
‘She wants it open, Weems.’
‘Yah.’
Gancia waved the knife slowly in front of Twoflower’s face.
‘Look,’ said Twoflower patiently, ‘I don’t think you understand. No-one can open the Luggage if it’s feeling in a locked mood.’
‘Oh yes, I forgot,’ said Gancia thoughtfully. ‘Of course, it’s a magic box, isn’t that right? With little legs, they say. I say, Weems, any legs your side? No?’
He held his knife to Twoflower’s throat.
‘I’m really upset about that,’ he said. ‘So’s Weems. He doesn’t say much but what he does is, he tears bits off people. So open – the – box!’
He turned and planted a kick on the side of the box, leaving a nasty gash in the wood.
There was a tiny little click.
Gancia grinned. The lid swung up slowly, ponderously. The distant firelight gleamed off gold – lots of gold, in plate, chain, and coin, heavy and glistening in the flickering shadows.
‘All right,’ said Gancia softly.
He looked back at the unheeding men around the fire, who seemed to be shouting at someone outside the cave. Then he looked speculatively at Weems. His lips moved soundlessly with the unaccustomed effort of mental arithmetic.
He looked down at his knife.
Then the floor moved.
‘I heard someone,’ said one of the men. ‘Down there. Among the – uh – rocks.’
Rincewind’s voice floated up out of the darkness.
‘I say,’ he said.
‘Well?’ said Herrena.
‘You’re in great danger!’ shouted Rincewind. ‘You must put the fire out!’
‘No, no,’ said Herrena. ‘You’ve got it wrong, you’re in great danger. And the fire stays.’
‘There’s this big old troll —’
‘Everyone knows trolls keep away from fire,’ said Herrena. She nodded. A couple of men drew their swords and slipped out into the darkness.
‘Absolutely true!’ shouted Rincewind desperately. ‘Only this specific troll can’t, you see.’
‘Can’t?’ Herrena hesitated. Something of the terror in Rincewind’s voice hit her.
‘Yes, because, you see, you’ve lit it on his tongue.’
Then the floor moved.
Old Grandad awoke very slowly from his centuries-old slumber. He nearly didn’t awake at all, in fact a few decades later none of this could have happened. When a troll gets old and starts to think seriously about the universe it normally finds a quiet spot and gets down to some hard philosophising, and after a while starts to forget about its extremities. It begins to crystallise around the edges until nothing remains except a tiny flicker of life inside quite a large hill with some unusual rock strata.
Old Grandad hadn’t quite got that far. He awoke from considering quite a promising line of inquiry about the meaning of truth and found a hot ashy taste in what, after a certain amount of thought, he remembered as being his mouth.
He began to get angry. Commands skittered along neural pathways of impure silicon. Deep within his sili-caceous body stone slipped smoothly along special fracture lines. Trees toppled, turf split, as fingers the size of ships unfolded and gripped the ground. Two enormous rock-slides high on his cliff face marked the opening of eyes like great crusted opals.
Rincewind couldn’t see all this, of course, since his own eyes were daylight issue only, but he did see the whole dark landscape shake itself slowly and then begin to rise impossibly against the stars.
The sun rose.
However, the sunlight didn’t. What did happen was that the famous Discworld sunlight, which as has already been indicated travels very slowly through the Disc’s powerful magical field, sloshed gently over the lands around the Rim and began its soft, silent battle against the retreating armies of the night. It poured like molten gold[4] across the sleeping landscape – bright, clean and, above all, slow.
Herrena didn’t hesitate. With great presence of mind she ran to the edge of Old Grandad’s bottom lip and jumped, rolling as she hit the earth. The men followed her, cursing as they landed among the debris.
Like a fat man trying to do press-ups the old troll pushed himself upwards.
This wasn’t apparent from where the prisoners were lying. All they knew was that the floor kept rolling under them and that there was a lot of noise going on, most of it unpleasant.
Weems grabbed Gancia’s arm.
‘It’s a herthquake,’ he said. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
‘Not without that gold,’ said Gancia.
‘What?’
‘The gold, the gold. Man, we could be as rich as Creosote!’
Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it. Gancia’s eyes gleamed more than gold, and he appeared to be staring at Weems’ left ear.
Weems looked desperately at the Luggage. It was still open invitingly, which was odd – you’d have thought all this shaking would have slammed the lid shut.
‘We’d never carry it,’ he suggested. ‘It’s too heavy,’ he added.
‘We’ll damn well carry some of it!’ shouted Gancia, and leapt towards the chest as the floor shook again.
The lid snapped shut. Gancia vanished.
And just in case Weems thought it was accidental the Luggage’s lid snapped open again, just for a second, and a large tongue as red as mahogany licked across broad teeth as white as sycamore. Then it slammed shut again.
To Weem’s further horror hundreds of little legs extruded from the underside of the box. It rose very deliberately and, carefully arranging its feet, shuffled around to face him. There was a particularly malevolent look about its keyhole, the sort of look that says ‘Go on – make my day . . .’
He backed away and looked imploringly at Twoflower.
‘I think it might be a good idea if you untied us,’ suggested Twoflower. ‘It’s really quite friendly once it gets to know you.’
Licking his lips nervously, Weems drew his knife. The Luggage gave a warning creak.
He slashed through their bonds and stood back quickly.
‘Thank you,’ said Twoflower.
‘I think my back’sh gone again,’ complained Cohen, as Bethan helped him to his feet.
‘What do we do with this man?’ said Bethan.
‘We take hish knife and tell him to bugger off,’ said Cohen. ‘Right?’
‘Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!’ said Weems, and bolted towards the cavemouth. For a moment he was outlined against the grey pre-dawn sky, and then he vanished. There was a distant cry of ‘aaargh’.
The sunlight roared silently across the land like surf. Here and there, where the magic field was slightly weaker, tongues of morning raced ahead of the day, leaving isolated islands of night that contracted and vanished as the bright ocean flowed onwards.
The uplands around the Vortex Plains stood out ahead of the advancing tide like a great grey ship.
It is possible to stab a troll, but the technique takes practice and no-one ever gets a chance to practise more than once. Herrena’s men saw the trolls loom out of the darkness like very solid ghosts. Blades shattered as they hit silica skins, there were one or two brief, flat screams, and then nothing more but shouts far away in the forest as they put as much distance as they could between themselves and the avenging earth.
Rincewind crept out from behind a tree and looked around. He was alone, but the bushes behind him rustled as the trolls lumbered after the gang.
He looked up.
High above him two great crystalline eyes focussed in atred of everything soft and squelchy and, above all, warm. Rincewind cowered in horror as a hand the size of a house rose, curled into a fist, and dropped towards him.
Day came with a silent explosion of light. For a moment the huge terrifying bulk of Old Grandad was a breakwater of shadow as the daylight streamed past. There was a brief grinding noise.
There was silence.
Several minutes passed. Nothing happened.
A few birds started singing. A bumblebee buzzed over the boulder that was Old Grandad’s fist and alighted on a patch of thyme that had grown under a stone fingernail.
There was a scuffling down below. Rincewind slid awkwardly out of the narrow gap between the fist and the ground like a snake leaving a burrow.
He lay on his back, staring up at the sky past the frozen shape of the troll. It hadn’t changed in any way, apart from the stillness, but already the eye started to play tricks. Last night Rincewind had looked at cracks in stone and seen them become mouths and eyes; now he looked at the great cliff face and saw the features become, like magic, mere blemishes in the rock.
‘Wow!’ he said.
That didn’t seem to help. He stood up, dusted himself off, and looked around. Apart from the bumble bee, he was completely alone.
After poking around for a bit he found a rock that, from certain angles, looked like Beryl.