The Last Continent

In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he'd been taught by his grandfather, who'd been taught it by his grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would be needed.

It meant the smell after rain.

It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.

The End

Much easier to discover than fire, and only slightly harder to discover than water.

Not why is it anything. Just why it is.

A cross between a porter and a proctor. A bledlow is not chosen for his imagination, because he usually doesn't have any.

Ankh-Morpork's leading vet, generally called in by people faced with ailments too serious to be trusted to the general medical profession. Doughnut's one blind spot was his tendency to assume that every patient was, to a greater or lesser extent, a racehorse.

In the case of cold fusion, this was longer than usual.

Wizards are certain of the existence of the temporal gland, although not even the most invasive alchemist has ever found where it is located and current theory is that it has a non-corporeal existence, like a sort of ethereal appendix. It keeps track of how old your body is, and is so susceptible to the influence of a high magical field that it might even work in reverse, absorbing the body's normal supplies of chrono-nine. The alchemists say it is the key to immortality, but they say that about orange juice, crusty bread and drinking your own urine. An alchemist would cut his own head off if he thought it'd make him live longer.

Broadly speaking, the acceleration of a wizard through the ranks of wizardry by killing off more senior wizards. It is a practice currently in abeyance, since a few enthusiastic attempts to remove Mustrum Ridcully resulted in one wizard being unable to hear properly for two weeks. Ridcully felt that there was indeed room at the top, and he was occupying all of it.

Sometimes Ponder thought his skill with Hex was because Hex was very dever and very stupid at the same time. If you wanted it to understand something, you had to break the idea down into bite-sized pieces and make absolutely sure there was no room for any misunderstanding. The quiet hours with Hex were often a picnic after five minutes with the senior wizards.

The Lecturer in Creative Uncertainty, for example, held rather smugly that he was in a state of both in-ness and outness until such time as anyone knocked on his door and collapsed the field, and that it was impossible to be categorical before that event. Logic is a wonderful thing but doesn't always beat actual thought.

Wizards also enjoy a bit of fun but never have much of a chance to develop the appropriate vocabulary.

This isn't magic. It is a simple universal law. People always expect to use a holiday in the sun as an opportunity to read those books they've always meant to read, but an alchemical combination of sun, quartz crystals and coconut oil will somehow metamorphose any improving book into a rather thicker one with a name containing at least one Greek word or letter (The Gamma Imperative, The Delta Season, The Alpha Project and, in the more extreme cases, even The Mu Kau Pi Capern). Sometimes a hammer and sickle turn up on the cover. This is probably caused by sunspot activity, since they are invariably the wrong way round. It's just as well for the Librarian that he sneezed when he did, or he might have ended up a thousand pages thick and crammed with weapons specifications.

The Senior Wrangler had once walked past Mrs Whitlow's rooms when the door was open, and he'd caught sight of the bare, headless, armless dressmaker's dummy that she used to make all her own clothes. He'd had to go and lie down quietly after that and, ever since, had thought about Mrs Whitlow in a special way.

Wizards lack the HW chromosome in their genes. Feminist researchers have isolated this as the one which allows people to see the washing-up in the sinks before the life forms grow-ing there have actually invented the wheel. Or discovered slood.

There's a certain type of manager who is known by his call of 'My door is always open' and it is probably a good idea to beat yourself to death with your own CV rather than work for him. In Ridcully's case, however, he meant, 'My door is alvays open because then, when I'm bored, I can fire my crossbow right across the hall and into the target just above the Bursar's desk.'

That is to say, she secretly considered them to be vicious, selfish and untrustworthy.