The Colour of Magic (25 page)

There were two gods, however, who were really terrifying. The rest of the gods were usually only sort of large-scale humans, fond of wine and war and whoring. But Fate and the Lady were chilling.

In the Gods' Quarter, in Ankh-Morpork, Fate had a small, heavy, leaden temple, where hollow-eyed and gaunt worshippers met on dark nights for their predestined and fairly pointless rites. There were no temples at all to the Lady, although she was arguably the most powerful goddess in the entire history of Creation. A few of the more daring members of the Gamblers' Guild had once experimented with a form of worship, in the deepest cellars of Guild headquarters, and had all died of penury, murder or just Death within the week. She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought her never found her, yet she was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need. And, then again, sometimes she didn't. She was like that. She didn't like the clicking of rosaries, but was attracted to the sound of dice. No man knew what She looked like, although there were many times when a man who was gambling his life on the turn of the cards would pick up the hand he had been dealt and stare Her full in the face. Of course, sometimes he didn't. Among all the gods she was at one and the same time the most courted and the most cursed.

'We don't have gods where I come from,' said Twoflower.

'You do, you know,' said the Lady. 'Everyone has gods. You just don't think they're gods.'

Rincewind shook himself mentally.

'Look,' he said. 'I don't want to sound impatient, but in a few minutes some people are going to come through that door and take us away and kill us.'

'Yes,' said the Lady.

'I suppose you wouldn't tell us
why
?' said Twoflower.

'Yes,' said the Lady. 'The Krullians intend to launch a bronze vessel over the edge of the disc. Their prime purpose is to learn the sex of A'Tuin the World Turtle.'

'Seems rather pointless,' said Rincewind.

'No. Consider. One day Great A'Tuin may encounter another member of the species
chelys galactica
, somewhere in the vast night in which we move. Will they fight? Will they mate? A little imagination will show you that the sex of Great A'Tuin could be very important to us. At least, so the Krullians say.'

Rincewind tried not to think of World Turtles mating. It wasn't completely easy.

'So,' continued the goddess, 'they intend to launch this ship of space, with two voyagers aboard. It will be the culmination of decades of research. It will also be very dangerous for the travellers. And so, in an attempt to reduce the risks, the Arch-astronomer of Krull has bargained with Fate to sacrifice two men at the moment of launch. Fate, in His turn, has agreed to smile on the space ship. A neat barter, is it not?'

'And we're the sacrifices,' said Rincewind.

'Yes.'

'I thought Fate didn't go in for that sort of bargaining. I thought Fate was implacable,' said Rincewind.

'Normally, yes. But you two have been thorns in his side for some time. He specified that the sacrifices should be you. He allowed you to escape from the pirates. He allowed you to drift into the Circumfence. Fate can be one mean god at times.'

There was a pause. The frog sighed and wandered off under the table.

'But you can help us?' prompted Twoflower.

'You amuse me,' said the Lady. 'I have a sentimental streak. You'd know that, if you were gamblers. So for a little while I rode in a frog's mind and you kindly rescued me, for, as we all know, no-one likes to see pathetic and helpless creatures swept to their death.'

'Thank you,' said Rincewind.

'The whole mind of Fate is bent against you,' said the Lady. 'But all I can do is give you one chance. Just one, small chance. The rest is up to you.'

She vanished.

'Gosh,' said Twoflower, after a while. 'That's the first time I've ever seen a goddess.'

The door swung open. Garhartra entered, holding a wand in front of him. Behind him were two guards, armed more conventionally with swords.

'Ah,' he said conversationally. 'You are ready, I see.'

Ready,
said a voice inside Rincewind's head.

The bottle that the wizard had flung some eight hours earlier had been hanging in the air, imprisoned by magic in its own personal time-field. But during all those hours the original mana of the spell had been slowly leaking away until the total magical energy was no longer sufficient to hold it against the Universe's own powerful normality field, and when that happened Reality snapped back in a matter of microseconds. The visible sign of this was that the bottle suddenly completed the last part of its parabola and burst against the side of the Guestmaster's head, showering the guards with glass and jellyfish wine.

Rincewind grabbed Twoflower's arm, kicked the nearest guard in the groin, and dragged the startled tourist into the corridor. Before the stunned Garhartra had sunk to the floor his two guests were already pounding across distant flagstones.

Rincewind skidded around a corner and found himself on a balcony that ran around the four sides of a courtyard. Below them, most of the floor of the yard was taken up by an ornamental pond in which a few terrapins sunbathed among the lily leaves.

And ahead of Rincewind were a couple of very surprised wizards wearing the distinctive dark blue and black robes of trained hydrophobes. One of them, quicker on the uptake than his companion, raised a hand and began the first words of a spell.

There was a short sharp noise by Rincewind's side. Twoflower had spat. The hydrophobe screamed and dropped his hand as though it had been stung.

The other didn't have time to move before Rincewind was on him, fists swinging wildly. One stiff punch with the weight of terror behind it sent the man tumbling over the balcony rail and into the pond, which did a very strange thing: the water smacked aside as though a large invisible balloon had been dropped into it, and the hydrophobe hung screaming in his own revulsion field.

Twoflower watched him in amazement until Rincewind snatched at his shoulder and indicated a likely-looking passage. They hurried down it, leaving the remaining hydrophobe writhing on the floor and snatching at his damp hand.

For a while there was some shouting behind them, but they scuttled along a cross corridor and another courtyard and soon left the sounds of pursuit behind. Finally Rincewind picked a safe-looking door, peered around it, found the room beyond to be unoccupied, dragged Twoflower inside, and slammed it behind him. Then he leaned against it, wheezing horribly.

'We're totally lost in a palace on an island we haven't a hope of leaving,' he panted. 'And what's more we—hey!' he finished, as the sight of the contents of the room filtered up his deranged optic nerves.

Twoflower was already staring at the walls.

Because what was so odd about the room was, it contained the whole Universe.

Death sat in His garden, running a whetstone along the edge of His scythe. It was already so sharp that any passing breeze that blew across it was sliced smoothly into two puzzled zephyrs, although breezes were rare indeed in Death's silent garden. It lay on a sheltered plateau overlooking the discworld's complex dimensions, and behind it loomed the cold, still, immensely high and brooding mountains of Eternity.

Swish! went the stone. Death hummed a dirge, and tapped one bony foot on the frosty flagstones.

Someone approached through the dim orchard where the nightapples grew, and there came the sickly sweet smell of crushed lilies. Death looked up angrily, and found Himself staring into eyes that were black as the inside of a cat and full of distant stars that had no counterpart among the familiar constellations of the Realtime universe.

Death and Fate looked at each other. Death grinned – He had no alternative, of course, being made of implacable bone. The whetstone sang rhythmically along the blade as He continued His task.

'I have a task for you,' said Fate. His words drifted across Death's scythe and split tidily into two ribbons of consonants and vowels.

I
HAVE TASKS ENOUGH THIS DAY
, said Death in a voice as heavy as neutronium. T
HE WHITE PLAGUE ABIDES EVEN NOW IN PSEUDOPOLIS AND I AM BOUND THERE TO RESCUE MANY OF ITS CITIZENS FROM HIS GRASP
. S
UCH A ONE HAS NOT BEEN SEEN THESE HUNDRED YEARS
. I
AM EXPECTED TO STALK THE STREETS, AS IS MY DUTY
.

'I refer to the matter of the little wanderer and the rogue wizard,' said Fate softly, seating himself beside Death's black-robed form and staring down at the distant, multifaceted jewel which was the disc universe as seen from this extra-dimensional vantage point.

The scythe ceased its song.

'They die in a few hours,' said Fate. 'It is fated.'

Death stirred, and the stone began to move again.

'I thought you would be pleased,' said Fate.

Death shrugged, a particularly expressive gesture for someone whose visible shape was that of a skeleton.

I
DID INDEED CHASE THEM MIGHTILY, ONCE
, he said,
BUT AT LAST THE THOUGHT CAME TO ME THAT SOONER OR LATER ALL MEN MUST DIE
. E
VERYTHING DIES IN THE END
. I
CAN BE ROBBED BUT NEVER DENIED, I TOLD MYSELF. WHY WORRY
?

'I too cannot be cheated,' snapped Fate.

S
O I HAVE HEARD
, said Death, still grinning.

'Enough!' shouted Fate, jumping to his feet. 'They will die!' He vanished in a sheet of blue fire.

Death nodded to Himself and continued at His work. After some minutes the edge of the blade seemed to be finished to His satisfaction. He stood up and levelled the scythe at the fat and noisome candle that burned on the edge of the bench and then, with two deft sweeps, cut the flame into three bright slivers. Death grinned.

A short while later he was saddling his white stallion, which lived in a stable at the back of Death's cottage. The beast snuffled at him in a friendly fashion; though it was crimson-eyed and had flanks like oiled silk, it was nevertheless a real flesh-and-blood horse and, indeed, was in all probability better treated than most beasts of burden on the disc. Death was not an unkind master. He weighed very little and, although He often rode back with His saddlebags bulging, they weighed nothing whatsoever.

'All those worlds!' said Twoflower. 'It's fantastic!'

Rincewind grunted, and continued to prowl warily around the star-filled room. Twoflower turned to a complicated astrolabe, in the centre of which was the entire Great A'Tuin-Elephant-Disc system wrought in brass and picked out with tiny jewels. Around it stars and planets wheeled on fine silver wires.

'Fantastic!' he said again. On the walls around him constellations made of tiny phosphorescent seed pearls had been picked out on vast tapestries made of jet-black velvet, giving the room's occupants the impression of floating in the interstellar gulf. Various easels held huge sketches of Great A'Tuin as viewed from various parts of the Circumfence, with every mighty scale and cratered pock-mark meticulously marked in. Twoflower stared about him with a faraway look in his eyes.

Rincewind was deeply troubled. What troubled him most of all were the two suits that hung from supports in the centre of the room. He circled them uneasily.

They appeared to be made of fine white leather, hung about with straps and brass nozzles and other highly unfamiliar and suspicious contrivances. The leggings ended in high, thick-soled boots, and the arms were shoved into big supple gauntlets. Strangest of all were the big copper helmets that were obviously supposed to fit on heavy collars around the neck of the suits. The helmets were almost certainly useless for protection – a light sword would have no difficulty in splitting them, even if it didn't hit the ridiculous little glass windows in the front. Each helmet had a crest of white feathers on top, which went absolutely no way at all towards improving their overall appearance.

Rincewind was beginning to have the glimmerings of a suspicion about those suits.

In front of them was a table covered with celestial charts and scraps of parchment covered with figures. Whoever would be wearing those suits, Rincewind decided, was expecting to boldly go where no man – other than the occasional luckless sailor, who didn't really count – had boldly gone before, and he was now beginning to get not just a suspicion but a horrible premonition.

He turned round and found Twoflower looking at him with a speculative expression.

'No—' began Rincewind, urgently. Twoflower ignored him.

'The goddess said two men were going to be sent over the Edge,' he said, his eyes gleaming, 'and you remember Tethis the troll saying you'd need some kind of protection? The Krullians have got over that. These are suits of
space
armour.'

'They don't look very roomy to me,' said Rincewind hurriedly, and grabbed the tourist by the arm, 'so if you'd just come on, no sense in staying here—'

'Why must you always
panic
?' asked Twoflower petulantly.

'Because the whole of my future life just flashed in front of my eyes, and it didn't take very long, and if you don't move now I'm going to leave without you because any second now you're going to suggest that we put on—'

The door opened.

Two husky young men stepped into the room. All they were wearing was a pair of woollen pants apiece. One of them was still towelling himself briskly. They both nodded at the two escapees with no apparent surprise.

The taller of the two men sat down on one of the benches in front of the seats. He beckoned to Rincewind, and said:

'? Tyø yur åtl hø sooten gåtrunen?'

And this was awkward, because although Rincewind considered himself an expert in most of the tongues of the hubwards segments of the disc it was the first time that he had ever been addressed in Krullian, and he did not understand one word of it. Neither did Twoflower, but that did not stop him stepping forward and taking a breath.

The speed of light through a magical aura such as the one that surrounded the disc was quite slow, being about the speed of sound in less highly tuned universes. But it was still the fastest thing around with the exception, in moments like this, of Rincewind's mind.