Eric

Rincewind took another bite of the sandwich. He'd looked death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly-retreating head many times, and suddenly the prospect of living forever didn't appeal. There were of course great questions he might learn the answer to, such as how life evolved and all the rest of it, but looked at as a way of spending all your spare time for the next infinity it wasn't a patch on a quiet evening strolling through the streets of Ankh.

Still, he'd acquired an ancestor. That was something. Not everyone had an ancestor. What would his ancestor have done in a situation like this?

He wouldn't have been here.

Well, yes, of course, but apart from that, he would have - he would have used his fine military mind to consider the tools available, that's what he would have done.

He had: item, one half-eaten egg and cress sandwich. No help there. He threw it away.

He had: item, himself. He drew a tick in the sand. He wasn't certain what use he could be, but he could come back to that later.

He had: item, Eric. Thirteen-year-old demonologist and acne attack ground zero.

That seemed to be about it.

He stared at the clean, fresh sand for a while, doodling in it.

Then he said, quietly: "Eric. Come here a moment..."

The waves were a lot stronger now. They had really got the hang of the tide thing, and were venturing a little ebb and flow.

Astfgl materialised in a puff of blue smoke.

"Aha!" he said, but this fell rather flat because there was no-one to hear it.

He looked down. There were footprints in the sand. Hundreds of them. They ran backwards and forwards, as if something had been frantically searching, and then vanished.

He leaned nearer. It was hard to make out, what with all the footprints and the effects of the wind and the tide, but just on the edge of the encroaching surf were the unmistakable signs of a magic circle.

Astfgl said a swearword that fused the sand around him into glass, and vanished.

The tide got on with things. Further down the beach the last surge poured into a hollow in the rocks, and the new sun beamed down on the soaking remains of a half-eaten egg and cress sandwich. Tidal action turned it over. Thousands of bacteria suddenly found themselves in the midst of a taste explosion, and started to breed like mad.

If only there had been some mayonnaise, life might have turned out a whole lot different. More piquant, and perhaps with a little extra cream in it.

Travelling by magic always had major drawbacks. There was the feeling that your stomach was lagging behind. And your mind filled up with terror because the destination was always a little uncertain. It wasn't that you could come out anywhere. "Anywhere" represented a very restricted range of choices compared to the kind of places magic could transport you to. The actual travelling was easy. It was achieving a destination which, for example, allowed you to survive in all four dimensions at once that took the real effort.

In fact the scope for error was so huge it seemed something of an anti-climax to emerge in a fairly ordinary, sandy-floored cavern.

It contained, on the far wall, a door.

There was a forbidding door. It looked as though its designer had studied all the cell doors he could find and had then gone away and produced a version for, as it were, full visual orchestra. It was more of a portal. Some ancient and probably fearful warning was etched over its crumbling arch, but it was destined to remain unread because over it someone else had pasted a bright red-and-white notice which read: "You Don't Have To Be ‘Damned' To Work Here, But It Helps!!!"

Rincewind squinted up at the notice.

"Of course I can read it," he said. "I just don't happen to believe it."

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

He looked behind him. The glowing outlines of Eric's magic circle faded and winked out.

"I'm not being picky, you understand," he said. "It's just that I thought you said you could get us back to Ankh. This isn't Ankh. I can tell by the little details, like the flickering red shadows and the distant screaming. In Ankh the screaming is usually much closer," he added.

"I think I did very well to get it to work at all," said Eric, bridling. "You're not supposed to be able to run magic circles in reverse. In theory it means you stay in the circle and reality moves around you. I think I did very well. You see," he added, his voice suddenly vibrating with enthusiasm, "if you rewrite the source codex and, this is the difficult bit, you route it through a high-level - "

"Yes, yes, very clever, what will you people think of next," said Rincewind. "The only thing is, we're, I think it's quite possible that we're in Hell."

"Oh?"

Eric's lack of reaction made Rincewind curious.

"You know," he added. "The place with all the demons in it?"

"Oh?"

"Not a good place to be, it's generally felt," said Rincewind.