Reaper Man

If you gave the globe a shake, a cloud of little white snowflakes swirled up in the liquid inside and settled, delicately, on a tiny model of a famous Ankh-Morpork landmark. In some globes it was the University, or the Tower of Art, or the Brass Bridge, or the Patrician’s Palace. The detail was amazing.

And then there were no more left. Well, thought Throat, that’s a shame. Since they hadn’t technically belonged to him — although morally, of course, morally they were his — he couldn’t actually complain. Well, he could complain, of course, but only under his breath and not to anybody specific. Maybe it was all for the best, come to think of it. Stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Get ’em off your hands — it made it much easier to spread them in a gesture of injured innocence when you said ‘Who, me?’

They were really pretty, though. Except, strangely enough, for the writing. It was on the bottom of each globe, in shaky, amateurish letters, as if done by someone who had never seen writing before and was trying to copy some down. On the bottom of every globe, below the intricate little snowflake-covered building, were the words:

Mustrum Ridcully, Archchancellor of Unseen University, was a shameless autocondimentor.[8] He had his own special cruet put in front of him at every meal. It consisted of salt, three types of pepper, four types of mustard, four types of vinegar, fifteen different kinds of chutney and his special favourite: Wow-Wow Sauce, a mixture of mature scumble, pickled cucumbers, capers, mustard, mangoes, figs, grated wahooni, anchovy essence, asafetida and, significantly, sulphur and saltpetre for added potency. Ridcully inherited the formula from his uncle who, after half a pint of sauce on a big meal one evening, had a charcoal biscuit to settle his stomach, lit his pipe and disappeared in mysterious circumstances, although his shoes were found on the roof the following summer.^{13}

There was cold mutton for lunch. Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior’s death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.

Mustrum tied his napkin behind his neck, rubbed his hands together, and reached out.

The cruet moved.

He reached out again. It slid away.

Ridcully sighed.

‘All right, you fellows,’ he said. ‘No magic at Table, you know the rules. Who’s playing silly buggers?’

The other senior wizards stared at him.

‘I, I, I don’t think we can play it any more,’ said the Bursar, who at the moment was only occasionally bouncing off the sides of sanity, ‘I, I, I think we lost some of the pieces …’

He looked around, giggled, and went back to trying to cut his mutton with a spoon. The other wizards were keeping knives out of his way at present.

The entire cruet floated up into the air and started to spin slowly. Then it exploded.

The wizards, dripping vinegar and expensive spices, watched it owlishly.

‘It was probably the sauce,’ the Dean ventured. ‘It was definitely going a bit critical last night.’

Something dropped on his head and landed in his lunch. It was a black iron screw, several inches long.

Another one mildly concussed the Bursar.

After a second or two, a third landed point down on the table by the Archchancellor’s hand and stuck there.

The wizards turned their eyes upwards.

The Great Hall was lit in the evenings by one massive chandelier, although the word so often associated with glittering prismatic glassware seemed inappropriate for the huge, heavy, black, tallow-encrusted thing that hung from the ceiling like a threatening overdraft. It could hold a thousand candles. It was directly over the senior wizards’ table.

Another screw tinkled on to the floor by the fireplace.

The Archchancellor cleared his throat.

‘Run?’ he suggested.

The chandelier dropped.

Bits of table and crockery smashed into the walls. Lumps of lethal tallow the size of a man’s head whirred through the windows. A whole candle, propelled out of the wreckage at a freak velocity, was driven several inches into a door.

The Archchancellor disentangled himself from the remains of his chair.

‘Bursar!’ he yelled.

The Bursar was exhumed from the fireplace.

‘Um, yes, Archchancellor?’ he quavered.

‘What was the meanin’ of that?’

Ridcully’s hat rose from his head.

It was a basic floppy-brimmed, pointy wizarding hat, but adapted to the Archchancellor’s outgoing lifestyle. Fishing flies were stuck in it. A very small pistol crossbow was shoved in the hatband in case he saw something to shoot while out jogging, and Mustrum Ridcully had found that the pointy bit was just the right size for a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Old Peculiar Brandy. He was quite attached to his hat.

But it was no longer attached to him.

It drifted gently across the room. There was a faint but distinct gurgling noise.