The Light Fantastic

There was the sound of feet behind him. Rincewind wheezed with effort; it sounded like the Luggage, and at the moment he didn’t want to meet the Luggage, because it might have got the wrong idea about him hitting its master, and generally the Luggage bit people it didn’t like. Rincewind had never had the nerve to ask where it was they actually went when the heavy lid slammed shut on them, but they certainly weren’t there when it opened again.

In fact he needn’t have worried. The Luggage overtook him easily, its little legs a blur of movement. It seemed to Rincewind to be concentrating very heavily on running, as if it had some inkling of what was coming up behind it and didn’t like the idea at all.

Don’t look back, he remembered. The view probably isn’t very nice.

The Luggage crashed through a bush and vanished.

A moment later Rincewind saw why. It had careened over the edge of the outcrop and was dropping towards the great hole underneath, which he could now see was faintly red lit at the bottom. Stretching from Rincewind, out over the edge of the rocks and down into the hole, were two shimmering blue lines.

He paused uncertainly, although that isn’t precisely true because he was totally certain of several things, for example that he didn’t want to jump, and that he certainly didn’t want to face whatever it was coming up behind him, and that in the spirit world Twoflower was quite heavy, and that there were worse things than being dead.

‘Name two,’ he muttered, and jumped.

A few seconds later the horsemen arrived and didn’t stop when they reached the edge of the rock but simply rode into the air and reined their horses over nothingness.

Death looked down.

THAT ALWAYS ANNOYS ME, he said. I MIGHT AS WELL INSTALL A REVOLVING DOOR.

‘Iwonder what they wanted!’ said Pestilence.

‘Search me,’ said War. ‘Nice game, though.’

‘Right,’ agreed Famine. ‘Compelling, I thought.’

WE’VE GOT TIME FOR ANOTHER FONDLE, said Death.

‘Rubber,’ corrected War.

RUBBER WHAT?

‘You call them rubbers,’ said War.

RIGHT, RUBBERS, said Death. He looked up at the new star, puzzled as to what it might mean.

I THINK WE’VE GOT TIME, he repeated, a trifle uncertainly.

Mention has already been made of an attempt to inject a little honesty into reporting on the Disc, and how poets and bards were banned on pain of—well, pain—from going on about babbling brooks and rosy-fingered dawn and could only say, for example, that a face had launched a thousand ships if they were able to produce certified dockyard accounts.

And therefore, out of a passing respect for this tradition, it will not be said of Rincewind and Twoflower that they became an ice-blue sinewave arcing through the dark imensions, or that there was a sound like the twanging of a monstrous tusk, or that their lives passed in front of their eyes (Rincewind had in any case seen his past life flash in front of his eyes so many times that he could sleep through the boring bits) or that the universe dropped on them like a large jelly.

It will be said, because experiment has proven it to be true, that there was a noise like a wooden ruler being struck heavily with a C sharp tuning fork, possibly B flat, and a sudden sensation of absolute stillness.

This was because they were absolutely still, and it was absolutely dark.

It occurred to Rincewind that something had gone wrong.

Then he saw the faint blue tracery in front of him.

He was inside the Octavo again. He wondered what would happen if anyone opened the book; would he and Twoflower appear like a colour plate?

Probably not, he decided. The Octavo they were in was something a bit different from the mere book chained to its lectern deep in Unseen University, which was merely a three-dimensional representation of a multidimensional reality, and—

Hold on, he thought. I don’t think like this. Who’s thinking for me?

‘Rincewind,’ said a voice like the rustle of old pages.

‘Who? Me?’

‘Of course you, you daft sod.’

A flicker of defiance flared very briefly in Rincewind’s battered heart.

‘Have you managed to recall how the Universe started yet?’ he said nastily. ‘The Clearing of the Throat, wasn’t it, or the Drawing of the Breath, or the Scratching of the Head and Trying to Remember It, It was On the Tip of the Tongue?’

Another voice, dry as tinder, hissed, ‘You would do well to remember where you are.’ It should be impossible to hiss a sentence with no sibilants in it, but the voice made a very good attempt.

‘Remember where I am? Remember where I am?’ shouted Rincewind. ‘Of course I remember where I am, I’m inside a bloody book talking to a load of voices I can’t see, why do you think I’m screaming?’

‘I expect you’re wondering why we brought you here again,’ said a voice by his ear.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘What did he say?’ said another disembodied voice.

‘He said no.’

‘He really said no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh.’

‘Why?’