'Anyway, I don't believe in Caroc cards,' he muttered, 'All that stuff about it being the distilled wisdom of the universe is a load of rubbish.'
The first card, smoke-yellowed and age-crinkled, was . . .
It should have been The Star. But instead of the familiar round disc with crude little rays, it had become a tiny red dot. The old woman muttered and scratched at the card with a fingernail, then looked sharply at Rincewind.
'Nothing to do with me,' he said.
She turned up the Importance of Washing the Hands, the Eight of Octograms, the Dome of the Sky, the Pool of Night, the Four of Elephants, the Ace of Turtles, and – Rincewind had been expecting it – Death.
And something was wrong with Death, too. It should have been a fairly realistic drawing of Death on his white horse, and indeed He was still there. But the sky was red lit, and coming over a distant hill was a tiny figure. barely visible by the light of the horsefat lamps.
Rincewind didn't have to identify it, because behind it was a box on hundreds of little legs.
The Luggage would follow its owner anywhere.
Rincewind looked across the tent to Twoflower, a pale shape on a pile of horsehides.
'He's really dead?' he said. Cohen translated for the old woman, who shook her head. She reached down to a small wooden chest beside her and rummaged around in a collection of bags and bottles until she found a tiny green bottle which she tipped into Rincewind's beer. He looked at it suspiciously.
'She shays it's sort of medicine,' said Cohen. 'I should drink it if I were you, theshe people get a bit upshet if you don't accshept hoshpitality.'
'It's not going to blow my head off?' said Rincewind.
'She shays it's esshential you drink it.'
'Well, if you're sure it's okay. It can't make the beer taste any worse.'
He took a swig, aware of all eyes on him.
'Um,' he said. 'Actually, it's not at all ba—'
Something picked him up and threw him into the air. Except that in another .sense he was still sitting by the fire – he could see himself there, a dwindling figure in the circle of firelight that was rapidly getting smaller. The toy figures around it were looking intently at his body. Except for the old woman. She was looking right up at , him, and grinning.
The Circle Sea's senior wizards were not grinning at all. They were becoming aware that they were confronted with something entirely new and fearsome: a young man on the make.
Actually none of them were quite sure how old Trymion really was, but his sparse hair was still black and his skin had a waxy look to it that could be taken, in a poor light, to be the bloom of youth.
The six surviving heads of the Eight Orders sat at the long, shiny and new table in what had been Galder Weatherwax's study and each one wondered precisely what it was about Trymon that made them want to kick him.
It wasn't that he was ambitious and cruel. Cruel men were stupid; they all knew how to use cruel men, and they certainly knew how to bend other men's ambitions. You didn't stay an Eighth Level magus for long unless you were adept at a kind of mental judo.
It wasn't that he was bloodthirsty, power-hungry or especially wicked. These things were not necessarily drawbacks in a wizard. The wizards were, on the whole, no more wicked than, say, the committee of the average Rotary Club, and each had risen to pre-eminence in his chosen profession not so much by skill at magic but by never neglecting to capitalise on the weaknesses of opponents.
It wasn't that he was particularly wise. Every wizard considered himself a fairly hot property, wisewise; it went with the job.
It wasn't even that he had charisma. They all knew charisma when they encountered it, and Trymon had all the charisma of a duck egg.
That was it, in fact . . .
He wasn't good or evil or cruel or extreme in any way but one, which was that he had elevated greyness to the status of a fine art and cultivated a mind that was as bleak and pitiless and logical as the slopes of Hell.
And what was so strange was that each of the wizards, who had in the course of their work encountered many a fire-spitting, bat-winged, tiger-taloned entity in the privacy of a magical octogram, had never before had quite the same uncomfortable feeling as they had when, ten minutes late, Trymon strode into the room.
'Sorry I'm late, gentlemen,' he lied, rubbing his hands briskly. 'So many things to do, so much to organise, I'm ure you know how it is.'
The wizards looked sidelong at one another as Trymon sat down at the head of the table and shuffled busily through some papers.
What happened to old Galder's chair, the one with the lion arms and the chicken feet?' said Jiglad Wert. It had gone, along with most of the other familiar furniture, and in its place were a number of low leather chairs that appeared to be incredibly comfortable until you'd sat in them for five minutes.