The Light Fantastic (Discworld 2)

Rincewind sat up. He appeared to be on a rock speckled with snow, but it didn't seem to be everything a rock ought to be. For example, it shouldn't be moving.

Snow blew around him. Twoflower was a few feet away, a look of genuine concern on his face.

Rincewind groaned. His bones were very angry at the treatment they had recently received and were queuing up to complain.

'What now?' he said.

You know when we were flying and I was worried we might hit something in the storm and you said the only thing we could possibly hit at this height was a cloud stuffed with rocks?'

'Well?'

'How did you know?'

Rincewind looked around, but for all the variety and interest in the scene around him they might as well have been in the inside of a pingpong ball.

The rock underneath was – well, rocking. He ran his hands over it, and felt the scoring of chisels. When he put an ear to the cold wet stone he fancied he could hear a dull, slow thumping, like a heartbeat. He crawled forward until he came to an edge, and peered very cautiously over it.

At that moment the rock must have been passing over a break in the clouds, because he caught a dim but horribly distant view of jagged-edged mountain peaks.

They were a long way down.

He gurgled incoherently and inched his way backwards.

'This is ridiculous,' he told Twoflower. 'Rocks don't fly. They're noted for not doing it.'

'Maybe they would if they could,' said Twoflower. 'Perhaps this one just found out how.'

'Let's just hope it doesn't forget again,' said Rincewind. He huddled up in his soaking robe and looked glumly at the cloud around him. He supposed there were some people somewhere who had some control over their lives; they got up in the mornings, and went to bed at night in the reasonable certainty of not falling over the edge of the world or being attacked by lunatics or waking up on a rock with ideas above its station. He dimly remembered leading a life like that once.

Rincewind sniffed. This rock smelt of frying. The smell seemed to be coming from up ahead, and appealed straight to his stomach.

'Can you smell anything?' he said.

'I think it's bacon,' said Twoflower.

'I hope it's bacon,' said Rincewind, 'because I'm going to eat it.' He stood up on the trembling stone and tottered forward into the clouds, peering through the wet gloom.

At the front or leading edge of the rock a small druid was sitting crosslegged in front of a small fire. A square of oilskin was tied across his head and knotted under his chin. He was poking at a pan of bacon with an ornamental sickle.

'Um,' said Rincewind. The druid looked up, and dropped the pan into the fire. He leapt to his feet and gripped the sickle aggressively, or at least as aggressively as anyone can look in a long wet white nightshirt and a dripping headscarf.

'I warn you, I shall deal harshly with hijackers,' he said, and sneezed violently.

'We'll help,' said Rincewind, looking longingly at the burning bacon. This seemed to puzzle the druid who, to Rincewind's mild surprise, was quite young; he supposed here had to be such things as young druids, theoretically, it was just that he had never imagined them.

'You're not trying to steal the rock?' said the druid, lowering the sickle a fraction.

'I didn't even know you could steal rocks,' said Rincewind wearily.

'Excuse me,' said Twoflower politely, 'I think your breakfast is on fire.'

The druid glanced down and flailed ineffectually at the flames. Rincewind hurried forward to help, there was a fair amount of smoke, ash and confusion, and the shared triumph of actually rescuing a few pieces of rather charred bacon did more good than a whole book on diplomacy.

'How did you get here, actually?' said the druid. 'We're five hundred feet up, unless I've got the runes wrong again.'

Rincewind tried not to think about height. 'We sort of dropped in as we were passing,' he said.

'On our way to the ground,' Twoflower added.