Pyramids (Discworld 7)

'It's electrum. Gold and silver alloy. The capstone has got to be made of electrum.'

Teppic peeled back the foil.

'This isn't all metal,' he said mildly.

'Yes. Well,' said Ptaclusp. 'We found, er, that foil works just as well.'

'Couldn't you use something cheaper? Like steel?' Ptaclusp sneered. It hadn't been a good day, sanity was a distant memory, but there were certain facts he knew for a fact.

'Wouldn't last for more than a year or two,' he said. 'What with the dew and so forth. You'd lose the point. Wouldn't last more than two or three hundred times.'

Teppic leaned his head against the pyramid. It was cold, and it hummed. He thought he could hear, under the throbbing, a faint rising tone.

The pyramid towered over him. (IIb could have told him that this was because the walls sloped in at precisely 56 degrees, and an effect known as battering made the pyramid loom even higher than it really was. He probably would have used words like perspective and virtual height as well.

The black marble was glassy smooth. The masons had done well. The cracks between each silky panel were hardly wide enough to insert a knife. But wide enough, all the same.

'How about once?' he said.

Koomi chewed his fingernails distractedly.

'Fire,' he said. 'That'd stop them. They're very inflammable. Or water. They'd probably dissolve.'

'Some of them were destroying pyramids,' said the high priest of Juf, the Cobra-Headed God of Papyrus.

'People always come back from the dead in such a bad temper,' said another priest.

Koomi watched the approaching army in mounting bewilderment.

'Where's Dios?' he said.

The old high priest was pushed to the front of the crowd.

'What shall I say to them?' Koomi demanded.

It would be wrong to say that Dios smiled. It wasn't an action he often felt called upon to perform. But his mouth creased at the edges and his eyes went half-hooded.

'You could tell them,' he said, 'that new times demand new men. You could tell them that it is time to make way for younger people with fresh ideas. You could tell them that they are outmoded. You could tell them all that.'

'They'll kill me!'

'Would they be that anxious for your eternal company, I wonder?'

'You're still high priest!'

'Why don't you talk to them?' said Dios. 'Don't forget to tell them that they are to be dragged kicking and screaming into the Century of the Cobra.' He handed Koomi the staff. 'Or whatever this century is called,' he added.

Koomi felt the eyes of the assembled brethren and sistren upon him. He cleared his throat, adjusted his robe, and turned to face the mummies.

They were chanting something, one word, over and over again. He couldn't quite make it out, but it seemed to have worked them up into a rage.

He raised the staff, and the carved wooden snakes looked unusually alive in the flat light.

The gods of the Disc - and here is meant the great consensus gods, who really do exist in Dunmanifestin, their semi-detached Valhalla on the world's impossibly high central mountain, where they pass the time observing the petty antics of mortal men and organising petitions about how the influx of the Ice Giants has lowered property values in the celestial regions - the gods of Disc have always been fascinated by humanity's incredible ability to say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time.

They're not talking here of such easy errors as 'It's perfectly safe', or 'The ones that growl a lot don't bite', but of simple little sentences which are injected into difficult situations with the same general effect as a steel bar dropped into the bearings of a 3,000 rpm, 660 megawatt steam turbine.

And connoisseurs of mankind's tendency to put his pedal extremity where his tongue should be are agreed that when the judges' envelopes are opened then Hoot Koomi's fine performance in 'Begone from this place, foul shades' will be a contender for all-time bloody stupid greeting.