The Disc, being flat, has no real horizon. Any adventurous sailors who got funny ideas from staring at eggs and oranges for too long and set out for the antipodes soon learned that the reason why distant ships sometimes looked as though they were disappearing over the edge of the world was that they were disappearing over the edge of the world.
But there was still a limit even to Galder’s vision in the mist-swirled, dust-filled air. He looked up. Looming high over the University was the grim and ancient Tower of Art, said to be the oldest building on the Disc, with its famous spiral staircase of eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight steps. From its crenelated roof, the haunt of ravens and disconcertingly alert gargoyles, a wizard might see to the very edge of the Disc. After spending ten minutes or so coughing horribly, of course.
‘Sod that,’ he muttered. ‘What’s the good of being a wizard, after all? Avyento, thessalousl I would fly! To me, spirits of air and darkness!’
He spread a gnarled hand and pointed to a piece of crumbling parapet. Octarine fire sprouted from under his nicotine-stained nails and burst against the otting stone far above.
It fell. By a finely calculated exchange of velocities Ga.cer rose, nightshirt flapping around his bony legs. Higher and higher he soared, hurtling through the pale night like a, like a – all right, like an elderly but powerful wizard being propelled upwards by an expertly judged thumb on the scales of the universe.
He landed in a litter of old nests, caught his balance, and stared down at the vertiginous view of a Disc dawn.
At this time of the long year the Circle Sea was almost on the sunset side of Cori Celesti, and as the daylight sloshed down into the lands around Ankh-Morpork the shadow of the mountain scythed across the landscape like the gnomon of God’s sundial. But nightwards, racing the slow light towards the edge of the world, a line of white mist surged on. There was a crackling of dry twigs behind him. He turned to see Ymper Trymon, second in command of the Order, who had been the only other wizard able to keep up.
Galder ignored him for the moment, taking care only to keep a firm grip on the stonework and strengthen his personal spells of protection. Promotion was slow in a profession that traditionally bestowed long life, and it was accepted that younger wizards would frequently seek advancement via dead men’s curly shoes, having previosly emptied them of their occupants. Besides, there was something disquieting about young Trymon. He didn’t smoke, only drank boiled water, and Galder had the nasty suspicion that he was clever. He didn’t smile often enough, and he liked figures and the sort of organisation charts that show lots of squares with arrows pointing 😮 other squares. In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word ‘personnel’ and mean it.
The whole of the visible Disc was now covered with a shmmering white skin that fitted it perfectly.
Galder looked down at his own hands and saw them covered with a pale network of shining threads that ollowed every movement.
He recognised this kind of spell. He’d used them himself. But his had been smaller – much smaller.
‘It’s a Change spell,’ said Trymon. The whole world is being changed.’
Some people, thought Galder grimly, would have had the decency to put an exclamation mark on the end of a statement like that.
There was the faintest of pure sounds, high and sharp, like the breaking of a mouse’s heart.
‘What was that?’ he said.
Trymon cocked his head.
‘C sharp, I think,’ he said.
Galder said nothing. The white shimmer had vanished, and the.first sounds of the waking city began to filter up to the two wizards. Everything seemed exactly the same as it had before. All that, just to make things stay the same?
He patted his nightshirt pockets distractedly and finally found what he was looking for lodged behind his ear. He put the soggy dogend in his mouth, called up mystical fire from between his fingers, and dragged hard on the wretched rollup until little blue lights flashed in front of his eyes. He coughed once or twice.
He was thinking very hard indeed.
He was trying to remember if any gods owed him any favours.
In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower.
But some clue as to what actually had happened might be found in the fact that Rincewind, whose past life had just got up to a quite interesting bit when he was fifteen, suddenly found himself not dying after all but hanging upside down in a pine tree.
He got down easily by dropping uncontrollably from branch to branch until he landed on his head in a pile of pine needles, where he lay gasping for breath and wishing he d been a better person.
Somewhere, he knew, there had to be a perfectly logical connection. One minute one happens to be dying, having dropped off the rim of the world, and the next one is upside down in a tree.
As always happened at times like this, the Spell rose up in his mind.
Rincewind had been generally reckoned by his tutors to be a natural wizard in the same way that fish are natural mountaineers. He probably would have been thrown out of Unseen University anyway – he couldn’t remember spells and smoking made him feel ill – but what had really caused trouble was all that stupid business about sneaking into the room where the Octavo was chained and opening it.
And what made the trouble even worse was that no-one could figure out why all the locks had temporarily become unlocked.
The spell wasn|t;sa demanding lodger. It just sat there like an old toad at the bottom of a pond. But whenever Rincewind was feeling really tired or very afraid it tried to get itself said. No-one:knew what would happen if one of the Eight Great Spells was said by itself, but the general Agreement was that the best place from which to watch the effects would be the next universe.
It was a weird thought to have, lying on a heap of pine needles after just falling off the edge of the world, but Rincewind had a feeling that the spell wanted to keep him alive.
‘Suits me,’ he thought.
He sat up and looked at the trees. Rincewind was a city wizard and, although he was aware that there were various differences among types of tree by which their nearest and dearest could tell them apart, the only thing he knew for certain was that the end without the leaves on fitted nto the ground. There were far too many of them, arranged with absolutely no sense of order. The place hadn’t been swept for ages.
He remembered something about being able to tell where you were by looking at which side of a tree the moss grew on. These trees had moss everywhere, and wooden warts, and scrabbly old branches; if trees were people, these trees would be sitting in rocking chairs.
Rincewind gave the nearest one a kick. With unerring aim it dropped an acorn on him. He said ‘Ow.’ The tree, in a voice like a very old door swinging open, said, ‘Serves you right.’
There was a long silence.
Then Rincewind said, ‘Did you say that?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that too?’
‘Yes.’
‘Oh.’ He thought for a bit. Then he tried, ‘I suppose you wouldn’t happen to know the way out of the forest, possibly, by any chance?’
‘No. I don’t get about much,’ said the tree.
‘Fairly boring life, I imagine,’ said Rincewind.
‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been anything else,’ said the tree.
Rincewind looked at it closely. It seemed pretty much like every other tree he’d seen.
‘Are you magical?’ he said.
‘No-one’s ever said,’ said the tree, ‘I suppose so.’
Rincewind thought: I can’t be talking to a tree. If I was talking to a tree I’d be mad, and I’m not mad, so trees can’t talk.
‘Goodbye,’ he said firmly.
‘Hey, don’t go,’ the tree began, and then realised the hopelessness of it all. It watched him stagger off through the bushes, and settled down to feeling the sun on its leaves, the slurp and gurgle of the water in its roots, and the very ebb and flow of its sap in response to the natural tug of the sun and moon. Boring, it thought. What a trange thing to say. Trees can be bored, of course, beetles do it all the time, but I don’t think that was what he was trying to mean. And: can you actually be anything else? In fact Rincewind never spoke to this particular tree again, but from that brief conversation it spun the basis of the first tree religion which, in time, swept the forests of the world. Its tenet of faith was this: a tree that was a good tree, and led a clean, decent and upstanding life, could be assured of a future life after death. If it was very good indeed it would eventually be reincarnated as five thousand rolls of lavatory paper.