Rincewind looked terrible. Creosote would have probably noted his flashing eyes and floating hair.
He looked like someone who had just eaten a handful of pineal glands and washed them down with a pint of adrenochrome. He looked so high you could bounce intercontinental TV off him.
Every single hair stood out from his head, giving off little sparks. Even his skin gave the impression that it was trying to get away from him. His eyes appeared to be spinning horizontally; when he opened his mouth, peppermint sparks flashed from his teeth. Where he had trodden, stone melted or grew ears or turned into something small and scaly and purple and flew away.
‘I say,’ said Nijel, ‘are you all right?’
‘Nnh,’ said Rincewind, and the syllable turned into a large doughnut.
‘You don’t look all right,’ said Nijel with what might be called, in the circumstances, unusual perspicacity.
‘Nnh.’
‘Why not try getting us out of here?’ Nijel added, and wisely flung himself flat on the floor.
Rincewind nodded like a puppet and pointed his loaded digit at the ceiling, which melted like ice under a blowlamp.
Still the rumbling went on, sending its disquieting harmonics dancing through the palace. It is a well-known factoid that there are frequencies that can cause panic, and frequencies that can cause embarrassing incontinence, but the shaking rock was resonating at the frequency that causes reality to melt and run out at the corners.
Nijel regarded the dripping ceiling and cautiously tasted it.
‘Lime custard,’ he said, and added, ‘I suppose there’s no chance of stairs, is there?’
More fire burst from Rincewind’s ravaged fingers, coalescing into an almost perfect escalator, except that possibly no other moving staircase in the universe was floored with alligator skin.
Nijel grabbed the gently spinning wizard and leapt aboard.
Fortunately they had reached the top before the magic vanished, very suddenly.
Sprouting out of the centre of the palace, shattering rooftops like a mushroom bursting through an ancient pavement, was a white tower taller than any other building in Al Khali.
Huge double doors had opened at its base and out of them, striding along as though they owned the place, were dozens of wizards. Rincewind thought he could recognise a few faces, faces which he’d seen before bumbling vaguely in lecture theatres or peering amiably at the world in the University grounds. They weren’t faces built for evil. They didn’t have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.
Nijel pulled back behind a handy wall. He found himself looking into Rincewind’s worried eyes.
‘Hey, that’s magic!’
‘I know,’ said Rincewind, ‘It’s not right!’ Nijel peered up at the sparkling tower.
‘But-’
‘It feels wrong,’ said Rincewind. ‘Don’t ask me why.’
Half a dozen of the Seriph’s guards erupted from an arched doorway and plunged towards the wizards, their headlong rush made all the more sinister by their hastly battle silences. For a moment their swords flashed in the sunlight, and then a couple of the wizards turned, extended their hands and -
Nijel looked away.
‘Urgh,’ he said.
A few curved swords dropped on to the cobbles.
‘I think we should very quietly go away,’ said Rincewind.
‘But didn’t you see what they just turned them into?’ ‘Dead people,’ said Rincewind. ‘I know. I don’t want to think about it.’
Nijel thought he’d never stop thinking about it, especially around Sam on windy nights. The point about being killed by magic was that it was much more inventive than, say, steel; there were all sorts of interesting new ways to die, and he couldn’t put out of his mind the shapes he’d seen, just for an instant, before the wash of octarine fire had mercifully engulfed them.
‘I didn’t think wizards were like that,’ he said, as they hurried down a passageway. ‘I thought they were more, well, more silly than sinister. Sort of figures of fun.’