'Good, good. We knew we could trust you from the day you first opened the Octavo.'
Rincewind hesitated. 'Hang on a minute,' he said. 'You want me to run around keeping the wizards from getting all the spells together?'
'Exactly.'
'That's why one of you got into my head?'
'Precisely.'
'You totally ruined my life, you know that?' said Rincewind hotly. 'I could have really made it as a wizard if you hadn't decided to use me as a sort of portable spellbook. I can't remember any other spells, they're too frightened to stay in the same head as you!'
'We're sorry.'
'I just want to go home! I want to go back to where—' a trace of moisture appeared in Rincewind's eye – 'to where there's cobbles under your feet and some of the beer isn't too bad and you can get quite a good piece of fried fish of an evening, with maybe a couple of big green gherkins, and even an eel pie and a dish of whelks, and there's always a warm stable somewhere to sleep in and in the morning you are always in the same place as you were the night before and there wasn't all this weather all over the place. I mean, I don't mind about the magic, I'm probably not, you know, the right sort of material for a wizard, I just want to go home!—'
'But you must—' one of the spells began.
It was too late. Homesickness, the little elastic band in the subconscious that can wind up a salmon and propel it three thousand miles through strange seas, or send a million lemmings running joyfully back to an ancestral homeland which, owing to a slight kink in the continental drift, isn't there any more – homesickness rose up inside Rincewind like a late-night prawn biriani, flowed along the tenuous thread linking his tortured soul to his body, dug its heels in and tugged . . .
9;s not the same,' said Twoflower calmly.
'It's better! It's more real!'
'It isn't really. In years to come, when I'm sitting by the fire —'
'You'll be sitting by the fire forever if we don't get out of here!'
'Oh, I do hope you're not going.'
They both turned. Ysabell was standing in the archway, smiling faintly. She held a scythe in one hand, a scythe with a blade of proverbial sharpness. Rincewind tried not to look down at his blue lifeline; a girl holding a scythe shouldn't smile in that unpleasant, knowing and slightly deranged way.
'Daddy seems a little preoccupied at the moment but I'm sure he wouldn't dream of letting you go off just like that,' she added. 'Besides, I'd have no-one to talk to.'
'Who's this?' said Twoflower.
'She sort of lives here,' mumbled Rincewind. 'She's a sort of girl,' he added.
He grabbed Twoflower's shoulder and tried to shuffle imperceptibly towards the door into the dark, cold garden. It didn't work, largely because Twoflower wasn't the sort of person who went in for nuances of expression and somehow never assumed that anything bad might apply to him.
'Charmed, I'm sure,' he said. Very nice place, you have here. Interesting baroque effect with the bones and skulls.'
Ysabell smiled. Rincewind thought: if Death ever does hand over the family business, she'll be better at it than he is – she's bonkers.
'Yes, but we must be going,' he said.
'I really won't hear of it,' she said. You must stay and tell me all about yourselves. There's plenty of time and it's so boring here.'
She darted sideways and swung the scythe at the shining threads. It screamed through the air like a neutered tomcat – and stopped sharply.
There was the creak of wood. The Luggage had snapped its lid shut on the blade.
Twoflower looked up at Rincewind in astonishment.
And the wizard, with great deliberation and a certain amount of satisfaction, hit him smartly on the chin. As the little man fell backwards Rincewind caught him, threw him over a shoulder and ran.
Branches whipped at him in the starlit garden, and small, furry and probably horrible things scampered away as he pounded desperately along the faint lifeline that shone eerily on the freezing grass.
From the building behind him came a shrill scream of disappointment and rage. He cannoned off a tree and sped on.