‘Small fluffy white ones. But the only stories I know are the ones father taught me when I was little, and I don’t think they’re really suitable.’
‘Not many rabbits?’
‘Lots of arms and legs being chopped off,’ said Conina, and sighed. ‘That’s why you mustn’t tell him about me you see? I’m just not cut out for a normal life.’
‘Telling stories in a harem isn’t bloody normal,’ said Rincewind. ‘It’ll never catch on.’
‘He’s looking at us again!’ Conina grabbed Rincewind’s arm.
He shook her off. ‘Oh, good grief,’ he said, and hurried across the room to Nijel, who grabbed his other arm.
‘You haven’t been telling her about me, have you?’ he demanded. ‘I’ll never live it down if you’ve told her that I’m only just learning how-’
‘Nonono. She just wants you to help us. It’s a sort of quest.’
Nijel’s eyes gleamed.
‘You mean a geas?’ he said.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s in the book. To be a proper hero it says you’ve got to labour under a geas.’
Rincewind’s forehead wrinkled. ‘Is it a sort of bird?’
‘I think it’s more a sort of obligation, or something,’ said Nijel, but without much certainty.
‘Sounds more like a kind of bird to me,’ said Rincewind, ‘I’m sure I read it in a bestiary once. Large. Couldn’t fly. Big pink legs, it had.’ His face went blank as his ears digested what they had just heard his lips say.
Five seconds later they were out of the room, leaving behind four prone guards and the harem ladies themselves, who settled down for a bit of story-telling.
The desert rimwards of Al Khali is bisected by the river Tsort, famed in myth and lies, which insinuates its way through the brown landscapes like a long damp descriptive passage punctuated with sandbanks. And every sandbank is covered with sunbaked logs, and most of the logs are the kind of logs that have teeth, and most of the logs opened one lazy eye at the distant sounds of splashing from upstream, and suddenly most of the logs had legs. A dozen scaly bodies slipped into the turbid waters, which rolled over them again. The dark waters were unruffled, except for a few inconsequential V -shaped ripples.
The Luggage paddled gently down the stream. The water was making it feel a little better. It spun gently in the weak current, the focus of several mysterious little swirls that sped across the surface of the water.
The ripples converged.
The Luggage jerked. Its lid flew open. It shot under the surface with a brief, despairing creak.
The chocolate-coloured waters of the Tsort rolled back again. They were getting good at it.
And the tower of sourcery loomed over Al Khali like a vast and beautiful fungus, the kind that appear in books with little skull-and-crossbones symbols beside them.
The Seriph’s guard had fought back, but there were now quite a lot of bewildered frogs and newts around the base of the tower, and they were the fortunate ones. They still had arms and legs, of a sort, and most of their essential organs were still on the inside. The city was under the rule of sourcery … martial lore.
Some of the buildings nearest the base of the tower were already turning into the bright white marble that the wizards obviously preferred.
The trio stared out through a hole in the palace walls.
‘Very impressive,’ said Conina critically. ‘Your wizards are more powerful than I thought.’
‘Not my wizards,’ said Rincewind. ‘I don’t know whose wizards they are. I don’t like it. All the wizards I knew couldn’t stick one brick on another.’
‘I don’t like the idea of wizards ruling everybody,’ said Nijel. ‘Of course, as a hero I am philosophically against the whole idea of wizardry in any case. The time will come when,’ his eyes glazed slightly, as if he was trying to remember something he’d seen somewhere, ‘the time will come when all wizardry has gone from the face of the world and the sons of, of - anyway, we can all be a bit more practical about things,’ he added lamely.
‘Read it in a book, did you?’ said Rincewind sourly. Any geas in it?’
‘He’s got a point,’ said Conina. ‘I’ve nothing against wizards, but it’s not as if they do much good. There just a bit of decoration, really. Up to now.’