Rincewind hesitated. Octarine sparks were spitting off the broomstick's bristles and he hated heights almost more than anything else, but what he really hated more than anything at all was a dozen very angry and bad-tempered wizards rushing up the stairs towards him, and this was happening.
'All right,' he said, 'but I'll drive.'
He lashed out with a boot at a wizard who was halfway through a Spell of Binding and jumped onto the broomstick, which bobbed down the stairwell and then turned upside down so that Rincewind was horribly eye to eye with a Brother of Midnight.
He yelped and gave the handlebars a convulsive twist.
Several things happened at once. The broomstick shot orward and broke through the wall in a shower of crumbs: the Luggage surged forward and bit the Brother in the leg: and with a strange whistling sound an arrow appeared from nowhere, missed Rincewind by inches, and struck the Luggage's lid with a very solid thud. The Luggage vanished.
In a little village deep in the forest an ancient shaman threw a few more twigs on his fire and stared through the smoke at his shamefaced apprentice.
'A box with legs on?' he said.
'Yes, master. It just appeared out of the sky and looked at me,' said the apprentice.
'It had eyes then, this box?'
'N—,' began the apprentice and stopped, puzzled. The old man frowned.
'Many have seen Topaxci, God of the Red Mushroom, and they earn the name of shaman,' he said. 'Some have seen Skelde, spirit of the smoke, and they are called sorcerers. A few have been privileged to see Umcherrel, the soul of the forest, and they are known as spirit masters. But none have seen a box with hundreds of legs that looked at them without eyes, and they are known as idio—'
The interruption was caused by a sudden screaming noise and a flurry of snow and sparks that blew the fire across the dark hut; there was a brief blurred vision and then the opposite wall was blasted aside and the apparition vanished.
There was a long silence. Then a slightly shorter silence. Then the old shaman said carefully, 'You didn't just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?'
The boy looked at him levelly. 'Certainly not,' he said.
The old man heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness for that,' he said. 'Neither did I.'
The cottage was in turmoil, because not only did the wizards want to follow the broomstick, they also wanted to prevent each other from doing so, and this led to several regrettable incidents.The most spectacular, and certainly the most tragic, happened when one Seer attempted to use his seven league boots without the proper sequence of spells and preparations. Seven league boots, as has already been intimated, are a tricksy form of magic at best, and he remembered too late that the utmost caution must be taken in using a means of transport which, when all is said and done, relies for its effectiveness on trying to put one foot twenty-one miles in front of the other.
The first snowstorms of winter were raging, and in fact there was a suspiciously heavy covering of cloud over most of the Disc. And yet, from far above and by the silver light of the discworld's tiny moon, it presented one of the most beautiful sights in the multiverse.
Great streamers of cloud, hundreds of miles along, swirled from the waterfall at the Rim to the mountains of the Hub. In the cold crystal silence the huge white spiral glittered frostily under the stars, imperceptibly turning, very much as though God had stirred His coffee and then poured the cream in.
Nothing disturbed the glowing scene, which —
Something small and distant broke through the cloud layer, trailing shreds of vapour. In the stratospheric calm the sounds of bickering came sharp and clear.
'You said you could fly one of these things!'
'No I didn't; I just said you couldn't!'
'But I've never been on one before!'
'What a coincidence!'
'Anyway, you said— look at the sky!'
'No I didn't!'
'What's happened to the stars?'
And so it was that Rincewind and Twoflower became the first two people on the Disc to see what the future held.
A thousand miles behind them the Hub mountain of Cori Celesti stabbed the sky and cast a knife-bright shadow across the broiling clouds, so that Gods ought to have noticed too – but the Gods don't normally look at the sky and in any case were engaged in litigation with the Ice Giants, who had refused to turn their radio down.
Rimwards, in the direction of Great A'Tuin's travel, the sky had been swept of stars.