The Light Fantastic (7 page)

“I should have been lisshening out,” said Cohen. “I should have been paying attenshion and not being shwayed by all this talk about your wosshnames, your din-chewers. I mussht be getting shoft.”

He levered himself up by his elbows. Herrena and the rest of the gang were standing around the fire in the cave mouth. The Luggage was still and silent under its net in a corner.

“There’s something funny about this cave,” said Bethan.

“What?” said Cohen.

“Well, look at it. Have you ever seen rocks like those before?”

Cohen had to agree that the semicircle of stones around the cave entrance were unusual; each one was higher than a man, and heavily worn, and surprisingly shiny. There was a matching semicircle on the ceiling. The whole effect was that of a stone computer built by a druid with a vague idea of geometry and no sense of gravity.

“Look at the walls, too.”

Cohen squinted at the wall next to him. There were veins of red crystal in it. He couldn’t be quite certain, but it was almost as if little points of light kept flashing on and off deep within the rock itself.

It was also extremely drafty. A steady breeze blew out of the black depths of the cave.

“I’m sure it was blowing the other way when we came in,” whispered Bethan. “What do you think, Twoflower?”

“Well, I’m not a cave expert,” he said, “but I was just thinking, that’s a very interesting stalag-thingy hanging from the ceiling up there. Sort of bulbous, isn’t it?”

They looked at it.

“I can’t quite put my finger on why,” said Twoflower, “but I think it might be a rather good idea to get out of here.”

“Oh yesh,” said Cohen sarcastically, “I shupposhe we’d jusht better ashk theesh people to untie ush and let us go, eh?”

Cohen hadn’t spent much time in Twoflower’s company, otherwise he would not have been surprised when the little man nodded brightly and said, in the loud, slow and careful voice he employed as an alternative to actually speaking other people’s languages: “Excuse me? Could you please untie us and let us go? It’s rather damp and drafty here. Sorry.”

Bethan looked sidelong at Cohen.

“Was he supposed to say that?”

“It’sh novel, I’ll grant you.”

And, indeed, three people detached themselves from the group around the fire and came toward them. They did not look as if they intended to untie anyone. The two men, in fact, looked the sort of people who, when they see other people tied up, start playing around with knives and making greasy suggestions and leering a lot.

Herrena introduced herself by drawing her sword and pointing it at Twoflower’s heart.

“Which one of you is Rincewind the wizard?” she said. “There were four horses. Is he here?”

“Um, I don’t know where he is,” said Twoflower. “He was looking for some onions.”

“Then you are his friends and he will come looking for you,” said Herrena. She glanced at Cohen and Bethan, then looked closely at the Luggage.

Trymon had been emphatic that they shouldn’t touch the Luggage. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but Herrena’s curiosity could have massacred a pride of lions.

She slit the netting and grasped the lid of the box.

Twoflower winced.

“Locked,” she said eventually. “Where is the key, fat one?”

“It—it hasn’t got a key,” said Twoflower.

“There is a keyhole,” she pointed out.

“Well, yes, but if it wants to stay locked, it stays locked,” said Twoflower uncomfortably.

Herrena was aware of Gancia’s grin. She snarled.

“I want it open,” she said. “Gancia, see to it.” She strode back to the fire.

Gancia drew a long thin knife and leaned down close to Twoflower’s face.

“She wants it open,” he said. He looked up at the other man and grinned.

“She wants it open, Weems.”

“Yah.”

Gancia waved the knife slowly in front of Twoflower’s face.

“Look,” said Twoflower patiently, “I don’t think you understand. No one can open the Luggage if it’s feeling in a locked mood.”

“Oh yes, I forgot,” said Gancia thoughtfully. “Of course, it’s a magic box, isn’t that right? With little legs, they say. I say, Weems, any legs your side? No?”

He held his knife to Twoflower’s throat.

“I’m really upset about that,” he said. “So’s Weems. He doesn’t say much but what he does is, he tears bits off people. So open—the—box!”

He turned and planted a kick on the side of the box, leaving a nasty gash in the wood.

There was a tiny little click.

Gancia grinned. The lid swung up slowly, ponderously. The distant firelight gleamed off gold—lots of gold, in plate, chain, and coin, heavy and glistening in the flickering shadows.

“All right,” said Gancia softly.

He looked back at the unheeding men around the fire, who seemed to be shouting at someone outside the cave. Then he looked speculatively at Weems. His lips moved soundlessly with the unaccustomed effort of mental arithmetic.

He looked down at his knife.

Then the floor moved.

“I heard someone,” said one of the men. “Down there. Among the—uh—rocks.”

Rincewind’s voice floated up out of the darkness.

“I say,” he said.

“Well?” said Herrena.

“You’re in great danger!” shouted Rincewind. “You must put the fire out!”

“No, no,” said Herrena. “You’ve got it wrong, you’re in great danger. And the fire stays.”

“There’s this big old troll—”

“Everyone knows trolls keep away from fire,” said Herrena. She nodded. A couple of men drew their swords and slipped out into the darkness.

“Absolutely true!” shouted Rincewind desperately. “Only this specific troll can’t, you see.”

“Can’t?” Herrena hesitated. Something of the terror in Rincewind’s voice hit her.

“Yes, because, you see, you’ve lit it on his tongue.”

Then the floor moved.

Old Grandad awoke very slowly from his centuries-old slumber. He nearly didn’t awake at all, in fact a few decades later none of this could have happened. When a troll gets old and starts to think seriously about the universe it normally finds a quiet spot and gets down to some hard philosophizing, and after a while starts to forget about its extremities. It begins to crystallize around the edges until nothing remains except a tiny flicker of life inside quite a large hill with some unusual rock strata.

Old Grandad hadn’t quite got that far. He awoke from considering quite a promising line of inquiry about the meaning of truth and found a hot ashy taste in what, after a certain amount of thought, he remembered as being his mouth.

He began to get angry. Commands skittered along neural pathways of impure silicon. Deep within his silicaceous body stone slipped smoothly along special fracture lines. Trees toppled, turf split, as fingers the size of ships unfolded and gripped the ground. Two enormous rockslides high on his cliff face marked the opening of eyes like great crusted opals.

Rincewind couldn’t see all this, of course, since his own eyes were daylight issue only, but he did see the whole dark landscape shake itself slowly and then begin to rise impossibly against the stars.

The sun rose.

However, the sunlight didn’t. What did happen was that the famous Discworld sunlight, which as has already been indicated travels very slowly through the Disc’s powerful magical field, sloshed gently over the lands around the Rim and began its soft, silent battle against the retreating armies of the night. It poured like molten gold
*
across the sleeping landscape—bright, clean and, above all, slow.

Herrena didn’t hesitate. With great presence of mind she ran to the edge of Old Grandad’s bottom lip and jumped, rolling as she hit the earth. The men followed her, cursing as they landed among the debris.

Like a fat man trying to do push-ups the old troll pushed himself upward.

This wasn’t apparent from where the prisoners were lying. All they knew was that the floor kept rolling under them and that there was a lot of noise going on, most of it unpleasant.

Weems grabbed Gancia’s arm.

“It’s a herthquake,” he said. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Not without that gold,” said Gancia.

“What?”

“The gold, the gold. Man, we could be as rich as Creosote!”

Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it. Gancia’s eyes gleamed more than gold, and he appeared to be staring at Weems’s left ear.

Weems looked desperately at the Luggage. It was still open invitingly, which was odd—you’d have thought all this shaking would have slammed the lid shut.

“We’d never carry it,” he suggested. “It’s too heavy,” he added.

“We’ll damn well carry some of it!” shouted Gancia, and leapt toward the chest as the floor shook again.

The lid snapped shut. Gancia vanished.

And just in case Weems thought it was accidental the Luggage’s lid snapped open again, just for a second, and a large tongue as red as mahogany licked across broad teeth as white as sycamore. Then it slammed shut again.

To Weems’s further horror hundreds of little legs extruded from the underside of the box. It rose very deliberately and, carefully arranging its feet, shuffled around to face him. There was a particularly malevolent look about its keyhole, the sort of look that says “Go on—make my day…”

He backed away and looked imploringly at Twoflower.

“I think it might be a good idea if you untied us,” suggested Twoflower. “It’s really quite friendly once it gets to know you.”

Licking his lips nervously, Weems drew his knife. The Luggage gave a warning creak.

He slashed through their bonds and stood back quickly.

“Thank you,” said Twoflower.

“I think my back’sh gone again,” complained Cohen, as Bethan helped him to his feet.

“What do we do with this man?” said Bethan.

“We take hish knife and tell him to bugger off,” said Cohen. “Right?”

“Yes, sir! Thank you, sir!” said Weems, and bolted toward the cavemouth. For a moment he was outlined against the gray predawn sky, and then he vanished. There was a distant cry of “aaargh.”

The sunlight roared silently across the land like surf. Here and there, where the magic field was slightly weaker, tongues of morning raced ahead of the day, leaving isolated islands of night that contracted and vanished as the bright ocean flowed onward.

The uplands around the Vortex Plains stood out ahead of the advancing tide like a great gray ship.

It is possible to stab a troll, but the technique takes practice and no one ever gets a chance to practice more than once. Herrena’s men saw the trolls loom out of the darkness like very solid ghosts. Blades shattered as they hit silica skins, there were one or two brief, flat screams, and then nothing more but shouts far away in the forest as they put as much distance as they could between themselves and the avenging earth.

Rincewind crept out from behind a tree and looked around. He was alone, but the bushes behind him rustled as the trolls lumbered after the gang.

He looked up.

High above him two great crystalline eyes focused in hatred of everything soft and squelchy and, above all, warm. Rincewind cowered in horror as a hand the size of a house rose, curled into a fist, and dropped toward him.

Day came with a silent explosion of light. For a moment the huge terrifying bulk of Old Grandad was a breakwater of shadow as the daylight streamed past. There was a brief grinding noise.

There was silence.

Several minutes passed. Nothing happened.

A few birds started singing. A bumblebee buzzed over the boulder that was Old Grandad’s fist and alighted on a patch of thyme that had grown under a stone fingernail.

There was a scuffling down below. Rincewind slid awkwardly out of the narrow gap between the fist and the ground like a snake leaving a burrow.

He lay on his back, staring up at the sky past the frozen shape of the troll. It hadn’t changed in any way, apart from the stillness, but already the eye started to play tricks. Last night Rincewind had looked at cracks in stone and seen them become mouths and eyes; now he looked at the great cliff face and saw the features become, like magic, mere blemishes in the rock.

“Wow!” he said.

That didn’t seem to help. He stood up, dusted himself off, and looked around. Apart from the bumblebee, he was completely alone.

After poking around for a bit he found a rock that, from certain angles, looked like Beryl.

He was lost and lonely and a long way from home. He—

There was a crunch high above him, and shards of rock spattered into the earth. High up on the face of Old Grandad a hole appeared; there was a brief sight of the Luggage’s backside as it struggled to regain its footing, and then Twoflower’s head poked out of the mouth cave.

“Anyone down there? I say?”

“Hey!” shouted the wizard. “Am I glad to see you!”

“I don’t know. Are you?” said Twoflower.

“Am I what?”

“Gosh, there’s a wonderful view from up here!”

It took them half an hour to get down. Fortunately Old Grandad had been quite craggy with plenty of hand-holds, but his nose would have presented a tricky obstacle if it hadn’t been for the luxuriant oak tree that flourished in one nostril.

The Luggage didn’t bother to climb. It just jumped, and bounced its way down with no apparent harm.

Cohen sat in the shade, trying to catch his breath and waiting for his sanity to catch up with him. He eyed the Luggage thoughtfully.

“The horses have all gone,” said Twoflower.

“We’ll find ’em,” said Cohen. His eyes bored into the Luggage, which began to look embarrassed.

“They were carrying all our food,” said Rincewind.

“Plenty of food in the foreshts.”

“I have some nourishing biscuits in the Luggage,” said Twoflower. “Traveler’s Digestives. Always a comfort in a tight spot.”

“I’ve tried them,” said Rincewind. “They’ve got a mean edge on them, and—”

Cohen stood up, wincing.

“Excushe me,” he said flatly. “There’sh shomething I’ve got to know.”

He walked over to the Luggage and gripped its lid. The box backed away hurriedly, but Cohen stuck out a skinny foot and tripped up half its legs. As it twisted to snap at him he gritted his teeth and heaved, jerking the Luggage onto its curved lid where it rocked angrily like a maddened tortoise.