Sourcery (Discworld 5)

The Librarian wrapped the silence around him like a cloak and stood staring up at the rank on rank of books, each one pulsing faintly in the glow of its own magic. Shelf after shelf looked down[14] at him. They had heard. He could feel the fear.

The orang-utan stood statue-still for several minutes, and then appeared to reach a decision. He knuckled his way across to his desk and, after much rummaging, produced a heavy key-ring bristling with keys. Then he went back and stood in the middle of the floor and said, very deliberately, ‘Oook.’

The books craned forward on their shelves. Now he had their full attention.

‘What is this place?’ said Conina.

Rincewind looked around him, and made a guess.

They were still in the heart of Al Khali. He could hear the hum of it beyond the walls. But in the middle of the teeming city someone had cleared a vast space, walled it off, and planted a garden so romantically natural that it looked as real as a sugar pig.

‘It looks like someone has taken twice five miles of inner city and girdled them round with walls and towers,’ he hazarded.

‘What a strange idea,’ said Conina.

‘Well, some of the religions here-well, when you die, you see, they think you go to this sort of garden, where there’s all this sort of music and, and,’ he continued, wretchedly, ’sherbet and, and - young women.’

Conina took in the green splendour of the walled garden, with its peacocks, intricate arches and slightly wheezy fountains. A dozen reclining women stared back at her, impassively. A hidden string orchestra was playing the complicated Klatchian bhong music.

‘I’m not dead,’ she said. ‘I’m sure I would have remembered. Besides, this isn’t my idea of paradise.’ She looked critically at the reclining figures, and added, ‘I wonder who does their hair?’

A sword point prodded her in the small of the back, and the two of them set out along the ornate path towards a small domed pavilion surrounded by olive trees. She scowled.

‘Anyway, I don’t like sherbet.’

Rincewind didn’t comment. He was busily examining the state of his own mind, and wasn’t happy at the sight of it. He had a horrible feeling that he was falling in love.

He was sure he had all the symptoms. There were the sweaty palms, the hot sensation in the stomach, the general feeling that the skin of his chest was made of tight elastic. There was the feeling every time Conina spoke, that someone was running hot steel into his spine.

He glanced down at the Luggage, tramping stoically alongside him, and recognised the symptoms.

‘Not you, too?’ he said.

Possibly it was only the play of sunlight on the Luggage’s battered lid, but it was just possible that for an instant it looked redder than usual.

Of course, sapient pearwood has this sort of weird mental link with its owner … Rincewind shook his head. Still, it’d explain why the thing wasn’t its normal malignant self.

‘It’d never work,’ he said. ‘I mean, she’s a female and you’re a, well, you’re a-’ He paused. ‘Well, whatever you are, you’re of the wooden persuasion. It’d never work. People would talk.’

He turned and glared at the black-robed guards behind him.

‘I don’t know what you’re looking at,’ he said severely.

The Luggage sidled over to Conina, following her so closely that she banged an ankle on it.

‘Push off,’ she snapped, and kicked it again, this time on purpose.

Insofar as the Luggage ever had an expression, it looked at her in shocked betrayal.

The pavilion ahead of them was an ornate onion-shaped dome, studded with precious stones and supported on four pillars. Its interior was a mass of cushions on which lay a rather fat, middle-aged man surrounded by three young women. He wore a purple robe interwoven with gold thread; they, as far as Rincewind could see, demonstrated that you could make six small saucepan lids and a few yards of curtain netting go a long way although - he shivered - not really far enough.

The man appeared to be writing. He glanced up at them.

‘I suppose you don’t know a good rhyme for “thou”?’ he said peevishly.

Rincewind and Conina exchanged glances.

‘Plough?’ said Rincewind. ‘Bough?’