'That's right. Mind you, there is a saving on the rates.'
'Rates?'
'Yes, they're—' the shopkeeper paused, and wrinkled his forehead. 'I can't quite remember, it was such a long time ago. Rates, rates —'
'Very large mice?'
'That's probably it.'
'Hold on – it's thinking about something,' said Cohen.
Lackjaw looked up wearily. It had been quite nice, sitting here in the shade. He had just worked out that in trying to escape from a city of crazed madmen he had appeared to have allowed one mad man to give him his full attention. He wondered whether he would live to regret this.
He earnestly hoped so.
'Oh yes, it's definitely thinking,' he said bitterly. 'Anyone can see that.'
'I think it's found them.'
'Oh, good.'
'Hold onto it.'
'Are you mad?' said Lackjaw.
'I know this thing, trust me. Anyway, would you rather be left with all these star people? They might be interested in having a talk with you.'
Cohen sidled over to the Luggage, and then flung himself astride it. It took no notice.
'Hurry up,' he said. 'I think it's going to go.'
Lackjaw shrugged, and climbed on gingerly behind Cohen.
'Oh?' he said, 'and how does it g —'
Ankh-Morpork!
Pearl of cities!
This is not a completely accurate description, of course – it was not round and shiny – but even its worst enemies would agree that if you had to liken Ankh-Morpork to anything, then it might as well be a piece of rubbish covered with the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.
There have been bigger cities. There have been richer cities. There have certainly been prettier cities. But no city in the multiverse could rival Ankh-Morpork for its smell.
The Ancient Ones, who know everything about all the universes and have smelt the smells of Calcutta and !Xrc —! and dauntocum Marsport, have agreed that even these fine examples of nasal poetry are mere limericks when set against the glory of the Ankh-Morpork smell.
You can talk about ramps. You can talk about garlic. You can talk about France. Go on. But if you haven't smelled Ankh-Morpork on a hot day you haven't smelled anything.
The citizens are proud of it. They carry chairs outside to enjoy it on a really good day. They puff out their cheeks and slap their chests and comment cheerfully on its little distinctive nuances. They have even put up a statue to it, to commemorate the time when the troops of a rival state tried to invade by stealth one dark night and managed to get to the top of the walls before, to their horror, their nose plugs gave out. Rich merchants who ave spent many years abroad sent back home for specially-stoppered and sealed bottles of the stuff, which brings tears to their eyes.
It has that kind of effect.
There is only really one way to describe the effect the smell of Ankh-Morpork has on the visiting nose, and that is by analogy.
Take a tartan. Sprinkle it with confetti. Light it with strobe lights.
Now take a chameleon.
Put the chameleon on the tartan.
Watch it closely.
See?
Which explains why, when the shop finally materialised in Ankh-Morpork, Rincewind sat bolt upright and said 'We're here,' Bethan went pale and Twoflower, who had no sense of smell, said, 'Really? How can you tell?'
It had been a long afternoon. They had broken into realspace in a number of walls in a variety of cities because, according to the shopkeeper, the Disc's magical field was playing up and upsetting everything.
All the cities were empty of most of their citizens and belonged to roaming gangs of crazed left-ear people.
'Where do they all come from?' said Twoflower, as they fled yet another mob.
'Inside every sane person there's a madman struggling to get out,' said the shopkeeper. 'That's what I've always thought. No one goes mad quicker than a totally sane person.'
'That doesn't make sense,' said Bethan, 'or if it makes sense, I don't like it.' .
The star was bigger than the sun. There would be no night tonight. On the opposite horizon the Disc's own sunlet was doing its best to set normally, but the general effect of all that red light was to make the city, never particularly beautiful, look like something painted by a fanatical artist after a bad time on the shoe polish.
But it was home. Rincewind peered up and down the mpty street and felt almost happy.
At the back of his mind the Spell was kicking up a ruckus, but he ignored it. Maybe it was true that magic was getting weaker as the star got nearer, or perhaps he'd had the Spell in his head for so long he had built up some kind of psychic immunity, but he found he could resist it.
'We're in the docks,' he declared. 'Just smell that sea air!'
'Oh,' said Bethan, leaning against the wall, 'yes.'
'That's ozone, that is,' said Rincewind. That's air with character, is that.' He breathed deeply.
Twoflower turned to the shopkeeper.
'Well, I hope you find your sorcerer,' he said. 'Sorry we didn't buy anything, but all my money's in my Luggage, you see.'
The shopkeeper pushed something into his hand.
'A little gift,' he said. 'You'll need it.'
He darted back into his shop, the bell jangled, the sign saying Call Again Tomorrow For Spoonfetcher's Leeches, the Little Suckers banged forlornly against the door, and the shop faded into the brickwork as though it had never been. Twoflower reached out gingerly and touched the wall, not quite believing it.
'What's in the bag?' said Rincewind.
It was a thick brown paper bag, with string handles.
'If it sprouts legs I don't want to know about it,' said Bethan.
Twoflower peered inside, and pulled out the contents.
Is that all?' said Rincewind. 'A little house with shells on?'
'It's very useful,' said Twoflower defensively. 'You can keep cigarettes in it.'
'And they're what you really need, are they?' said Rincewind.
'I'd plump for a bottle of really strong sun-tan oil,' said Bethan.
'Come on,' said Rincewind, and set off down the street. The others followed.
It occurred to Twoflower that some words of comfort were called for, a little tactful small talk to take Bethan out f herself, as he would put it, and generally cheer her up.
'Don't worry,' he said. There's just a chance that Cohen might still be alive.'
'Oh, I expect he's alive all right,' she said, stamping along the cobbles as if she nursed a personal grievance against each one of them. 'You don't live to be eighty-seven in his job if you go around dying all the time. But he's not here.'
'Nor is my Luggage,' said Twoflower. 'Of course, that's not the same thing.'
'Do you think the star is going to hit the Disc?'
'No,' said Twoflower confidently.
'Why not?'
'Because Rincewind doesn't think so.'
She looked at him in amazement.
'You see,' the tourist went on, 'you know that thing you do with seaweed?'
Bethan, brought up on the Vortex Plains, had only heard of the sea in stories, and had decided she didn't like it. She looked blank.
'Eat it?'
'No, what you do is, you hang it up outside your door, and it tells you if it's going to rain.'
Another thing Bethan had learned was that there was no real point in trying to understand anything Twoflower said, and that all anyone could do was run alongside the conversation and hope to jump on as it turned a corner.
'I see,' she said.
'Rincewind is like that, you see.'
'Like seaweed.'
'Yes. If there was anything at all to be frightened about, he'd be frightened. But he's not. The star is just about the only thing I've ever seen him not frightened of. If he's not worried, then take it from me, there's nothing to worry about.'
'It's not going to rain?' said Bethan.
'Well, no. Metaphorically speaking.'
'Oh.' Bethan decided not to ask what 'metaphorically' meant, in case it was something to do with seaweed.
Rincewind turned around.
'Come on,' he said. 'Not far now.'
'Where to?' said Twoflower.
'Unseen University, of course.'
'Is that wise?'
'Probably not, but I'm still going—' Rincewind paused, his face a mask of pain. He put his hand to his ears and groaned.
'Spell giving you trouble?'
'Yargh.'
'Try humming.'
Rincewind grimaced. 'I'm going to get rid of this thing,' he said thickly. 'It's going back into the book where it belongs. I want my head back!'
'But then—' Twoflower began, and stopped. They could all hear it – a distant chanting and the stamping of many feet.
'Do you think it's star people?' said Bethan.
It was. The lead marchers came around a corner a hundred yards away, behind a ragged white banner with an eight-pointed star on it.
'Not just star people,' said Twoflower. 'All kinds of people!'
The crowd swept them up in its passage. One moment they were standing in the deserted street, the next they were perforce moving with a tide of humanity that bore them onwards through the city.
Torchlight flickered easily on the damp tunnels far under the University as the heads of the eight Orders of wizardry filed onwards.
'At least it's cool down here,' said one.
'We shouldn't be down here.'
Trymon, who was leading the party, said nothing. But he was thinking very hard. He was thinking about the ottle of oil in his belt, and the eight keys the wizards carried – eight keys that would fit the eight locks that chained the Octavo to its lectern. He was thinking that old wizards who sense that magic is draining away are preoccupied with their own problems and are perhaps less alert than they should be. He was thinking that within a few minutes the Octavo, the greatest concentration of magic on the Disc, would be under his hands.
Despite the coolness of the tunnel he began to sweat.
They came to a lead-lined door set in the sheer stone. Trymon took a heavy key – a good, honest iron key, not like the twisted and disconcerting keys that would unlock the Octavo – gave the lock a squirt of oil, inserted the key, turned it. The lock squeaked open protestingly.
'Are we of one resolve?' said Trymon. There was a series of vaguely affirmative grunts.
He pushed at the door.
A warm gale of thick and somehow oily air rolled over them. The air was filled with a high-pitched and unpleasant chittering. Tiny sparks of octarine fire flared off every nose, fingernail and beard.
The wizards, their heads bowed against the storm of randomised magic that blew out of the room, pushed forward. Half-formed shapes giggled and fluttered around them as the nightmare inhabitants of the Dungeon Dimensions constantly probed (with things that passed for fingers only because they were at the ends of their arms) for an unguarded entry into the circle of firelight that passed for the universe of reason and order.
Even at this bad time for all things magical, even in a room designed to damp down all magical vibrations, the Octavo was still crackling with power.
There was no real need for the torches. The Octavo filled the room with a dull, sullen light, which wasn't strictly light at all but the opposite of light; darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.
It was a rather disappointing purple colour.
As has been noted before, the Octavo was chained to a lectern carved into the shape of something that looked vaguely avian, slightly reptilian and horribly alive. Two glittering eyes regarded the wizards with hooded hatred.
'I saw it move,' said one of them.
'We're safe so long as we don't touch the book,' said Trymon. He pulled a scroll out of his belt and unrolled it.
'Bring that torch here,' he said, 'and put that cigarette out!'
He waited for the explosion of infuriated pride. But none came. Instead, the offending mage removed the dogend from his lips with trembling fingers and ground it into the floor.
Trymon exulted. So, he thought, they do what I say. Just for now, maybe – but just for now is enough.
He peered at the crabby writing of a wizard long dead.
'Right,' he said, let's see: "To Appease Yt, The Thynge That Ys The Guardian . . ." '
The crowd surged over one of the bridges that linked Morpork with Ankh. Below it the river, turgid at the best of times, was a mere trickle which steamed.
The bridge shook under their feet rather more than it should. Strange ripples ran across the muddy remains of the river. A few tiles slid off the roof of a nearby house.
'What was that?' said Twoflower.
Bethan looked behind them, and screamed.
The star was rising. As the Disc's own sun scurried for safety below the horizon the great bloated ball of the star climbed slowly into the sky until the whole of it was several degrees above the edge of the world.
They pulled Rincewind into the safety of a doorway. The crowd hardly noticed them, but ran on, terrified as lemmings.
'The star's got spots on,' said Twoflower.
'No,' said Rincewind. 'They're . . . things. Things going around the star. Like the sun goes around the Disc. But they're close in, because, because . . .' he paused. 'I nearly know!'
'Know what?'
'I've got to get rid of this Spell!'
'Which way is the University?' said Bethan.
'This way!' said Rincewind, pointing along the street.
'It must be very popular. That's where everyone's going.'
'I wonder why?' said Twoflower.
'Somehow,' said Rincewind, 'I don't think it's to enroll for evening classes.'
In fact Unseen University was under siege, or at least those parts of it that extruded into the usual, everyday dimensions were under siege. The crowds outside its gates were, generally, making one of two demands. They were demanding that either a) the wizards should stop messing about and get rid of the star or, and this was the demand favoured by the star people, that b) they should cease all magic and commit suicide in good order, thus ridding the Disc of the curse of magic and warding off the terrible threat in the sky.
