Sourcery (Discworld 5)

‘-’ he began, and stopped. Coin was still holding a sphere, a sphere of air. Inside it, distorted as though seen through a fisheye lens or the bottom of a bottle, was the Great Hall of Unseen University.

The boy looked around at the trees, squinted thoughtfully at the distant, snow-capped mountains, and nodded at the astonished men.

‘It’s not bad,’ he said. ‘I should like to come here again.’ He moved his hands in a complicated motion that seemed, in some unexplained way, to turn them inside out.

Now the wizards were back in the hall, and the boy was holding the shrinking Garden in his palm. In the heavy, shocked silence he put it back into Billias’s hands, and said: ‘That was quite interesting. Now I will do some magic.’

He raised his hands, stared at Billias, and vanished him.

Pandemonium broke out, as it tends to on these occasions. In the centre of it stood Coin, totally composed, in a spreading cloud of greasy smoke.

Ignoring the tumult, Spelter bent down slowly and, with extreme care, picked a peacock feather off the floor. He rubbed it thoughtfully back and forth across his lips as he looked from the doorway to the boy to the vacant Archchancellor’s chair, and his thin mouth narrowed, and he began to smile.

An hour later, as thunder began to roll in the clear skies above the city, and Rincewind was beginning to sing gently and forget all about cockroaches, and a lone mattress was wandering the streets, Spelter shut the door of the Archchancellor’s study and turned to face his fellow mages.

There were six of them, and they were very worried.

They were so worried, Spelter noted, that they were listening to him, a mere fifth level wizard.

‘He’s gone to bed,’ he said, ‘with a hot milk drink.’

‘Milk?’ said one of the wizards, with tired horror in his voice.

‘He’s too young for alcohol’, explained the bursar.

‘Oh, yes. Silly of me.’

The hollow-eyed wizard opposite said: ‘Did you see what he did to the door?’

‘I know what he did to Billias!’

‘What did he do?’

‘I don’t want to know!’

‘Brothers, brothers,’ said Spelter soothingly. He looked down at their worried faces and thought: too many dinners. Too many afternoons waiting for the servants to bring in the tea. Too much time spent in stuffy rooms reading old books written by dead men. Too much gold brocade and ridiculous ceremony. Too much fat. The whole University is ripe for one good push …

Or one good pull …

‘I wonder if we really have, um, a problem here,’ he said.

Gravie Derment of the Sages of the Unknown Shadow hit the table with his fist.

‘Good grief, man!’ he snapped. ‘Some child wanders in out of the night, beats two of the University’s finest, sits down in the Archchancellor’s chair and you wonder if we have a problem? The boy’s a natural! From what we’ve seen tonight, there isn’t a wizard on the Disc who could stand against him!’

‘Why should we stand against him?’ said Spelter, in a reasonable tone of voice.

‘Because he’s more powerful than we are!’

‘Yes?’ Spelter’s voice would have made a sheet of glass look like a ploughed field, it made honey look like gravel.

‘It stands to reason-’

Gravie hesitated. Spelter gave him an encouraging smile.

‘Ahem.’

The ahemmer was Marmaric Carding, head of the Hoodwinkers. He steepled his beringed fingers and peered sharply at Spelter over the top of them. The bursar disliked him intensely. He had considerable doubt about the man’s intelligence. He suspected it might be quite high, and that behind those vein-crazed jowls was a mind full of brightly polished little wheels, spinning like mad.