The Last Continent

It sounded like quite an angry thought.

'What's that you're drawing, Dean?' said the Senior Wrangler.

'What does it look like? A bird, of course.'

The voice in the Bursar's head thought: but a bird must fly. Where are the wings?

This one's standing on the ground. You don't see the wings,' said the Dean, and then looked puzzled at having answered a question no one had asked. 'Blast! You know, it's harder than it looks, drawing on a rock...'

I always see the wings, thought the voice in the Bursar's head. The Bursar fumbled for his dried frog pill bottle. The voices were never usually this precise.

'Very flat bird,' said Ridcully. 'Come on, Dean, our friend here isn't very happy. Let's go and work out a really good boat spell...'

'Looks more like a weasel to me,' said the Senior Wrangler. 'You've got the tail wrong.'

'The stick slipped.'

'A duck's fatter than that,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. 'You shouldn't try to show off. Dean. When was the last time you saw a duck that didn't have peas round it?'

'Last week, actually!'

'Yes, we had crispy duck. With plum sauce, I now recall. Here, let me have a go...'

'Now you've given it three legs!'

'I did ask for the stick! You snatched it away!'

'Now look,' said Ridcully. 'I'm a man who knows his ducks, and what you've got there is laughable. Give me that... thank you. You do a beak like this

'That's on the wrong end and it's too big.'

'You think that's a beak?'

'Look, all three of you are barking up the wrong tree here. Give me that stick...'

'Ah, but, you see, ducks don't bark! Hah! There's no need to snatch like that—'

Unseen University was built of stone – so built out of stone that in fact there were many places where it was hard to tell where wild rock ended and domesticated stone began.

It was hard to imagine what else you could build a university out of. If Rincewind had set out to list possible materials he wouldn't have included corrugated iron sheets.

In response to some sort of wizardly ancestral memory, though, the sheets around the gates had been quite expertly bent and hammered into the shape of a stone arch. Over it, burned into the thin metal, were the words: NULLUS ANXIETAS.

'I shouldn't be surprised, should I?' he said. 'No worries.'

The gates, which were also made of corrugated iron nailed to bits of wood by a man using secondhand nails, were firmly shut. A crowd of people were hammering on them.

'Looks like a lot of other people have the same idea,' said Neilette.

'There'll be another way in,' said Rincewind, walking away. 'There'll be an alley... Ah, there it is. Now, these aren't stone walls, so there won't be removable bricks, which means...' He prodded at the tin sheets, and one of them wobbled. 'Ah, yes. A loose sheet which swings aside so you can get back in after hours.'

'How did you know that?'

'This is a university, isn't it? Come on.'

A message had been chalked beside the loose sheet.

' "Nulli Sheilae sanguineae," ' Rincewind read aloud. 'But your name's not Sheila, so we're probably okay.'

'If it means what I think it means, it means they don't allow women,' said Neilette. 'You should've brought Darleen.'

'Sorry?'

'Forget I mentioned it.'

Somewhat to Rincewind's surprise there was a short, pleasant lawn on the other side of the fence, illuminated by the light from a large low building. All the buildings were low but had big wide roofs, giving the effect you might get if someone stepped on a lot of square mushrooms. If they had been painted, it had been an historical event, probably coming somewhere between Fire and the Invention of the Wheel.

There was a tower. It was about twenty feet high.

'I don't call this much of a university,' said Rincewind. He allowed himself a touch of smugness. 'Twenty feet high? I could pi— I could spit from the top of it. Oh well...'

He made for the doorway, just as the light grew a lot brighter and was tinted with octarine, the eighth colour that was intimately associated with magic. The doors themselves were shut fast.

He banged on them, making them rattle. 'Fraternal greetings, brothers!' he shouted. 'I bring you— Good grie—'

The world simply changed. One moment he was standing in front of a rusting door and the next he was in a circle with half a dozen wizards watching him.

He caught his balance.

'Well, full marks for effort,' he managed. 'Where I come from, and you can call me Mister Boring if you like, we just open the door.'

'Stone the crows, but we're getting good at this,' said a wizard.

And they were wizards. Rincewind was in no doubt of it. They had proper pointy hats, although the brims were larger than anything he'd seen without flying buttresses. Their robes weren't much more than waist length, and below them they wore shorts, long grey socks, and big leather sandals. A lot of this was not the typical wizarding outfit as he'd grown up to understand it, but they were still wizards. They had that unmistakable hot-air-balloon-about-to-take-off look.