The Light Fantastic (Discworld 2)

It was a small and squeaky voice and came from the picture box still slung around Twoflower's inert neck.

The picture imp opened his hatch and squinted up at Rincewind.

'Where's this, squire?' it said.

'I'm not sure.'

'We still dead?'

'Maybe.'

'Well, let's hope we go somewhere where we don't need too much black, because I've run out.' The hatch slammed shut.

Rincewind had a fleeting vision of Twoflower handing around his pictures and saying things like 'This is me being tormented by a million demons' and 'This is me with that funny couple we met on the freezing slopes of the Underworld.' Rincewind wasn't certain about what happened to you after you really died, the authorities were a little unclear on the subject; a swarthy sailor from the Rimward lands had said that he was confident of going to a paradise where there was sherbet and houris. Rincewind wasn't certain what a houri was, but after some thought he came to the conclusion that it was a little liquorice tube for sucking up the sherbet. Anyway, sherbet made him sneeze.

'Now that interruption is over,' said a dry voice firmly, 'perhaps we can get on. It is most important that you don't let the wizards take the spell from you. Terrible things will happen if all eight spells are said too soon.'

'I just want to be left in peace,' said Rincewind.

'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 . . .

The spells were alone inside their Octavo.

Alone, at any rate, apart from the Luggage.

They looked at it, not with eyes, but with consciousness as old as the Discworld itself.

'And you can bugger off too,' they said.

'— bad.'

Rincewind knew it was himself speaking, he recognised the voice. For a moment he was looking out through his eyes not in any normal way, but as a spy might peer through the cut-out eyes of a picture. Then he was back.

'You okay, Rinshwind?' said Cohen. 'You looked a bit gone there.'

'You did look a bit white,' agreed Bethan. 'Like someone had walked over your grave.'

'Uh, yes, it was probably me,' he said. He held up his fingers and counted them. There appeared to be the normal amount.

'Um, have I moved at all?' he said.