Pyramids (Discworld 7)

Only then did the boom come. It went on for quite along time.

Grey dust rolled over the kingdom.

Ptaclusp dragged himself upright and groped ahead, gingerly, until he walked into someone. He shuddered when he thought about the kind of people he'd seen walking around lately, but thought didn't come easily because something appeared to have hit him on the head recently .

'Is that you, lad?' he ventured.

'Is that you, dad?'

'Yes,' said Ptaclusp.

'It's me, dad.'

'I'm glad it's you, son.'

'Can you see anything?'

'No. It's all mist and fog.'

'Thank the gods for that, I thought it was me.'

'It is you, isn't it? You said.'

'Yes, dad.'

'Is your brother all right?'

'I've got him safe in my pocket, dad.'

'Good. So long as nothing's happened to him.'

They inched forward, clambering over lumps of masonry they could barely see.

'Something exploded, dad,' said IIb, slowly. 'I think it was the pyramid.'

Ptaclusp rubbed the top of his head, where two tons of flying rock had come within a sixteenth of an inch of fitting him for one of his own pyramids. 'It was that dodgy cement we bought from Merco the Ephebian, I expect-'

'I think this was a bit worse than a moody lintel, dad,' said IIb. 'In fact, I think it was a lot worse.'

'It looked a bit wossname, a bit on the sandy side-'

'I think you should find somewhere to sit down, dad,' said IIb, as kindly as possible. 'Here's Two-Ay. Hang on to him.'

He crept on alone, climbing over a slab of what felt very suspiciously like black marble. What he wanted, he decided, was a priest. They had to be useful for something, and this seemed the sort of time one might need one. For solace, or possibly, he felt obscurely, to beat their head in with a rock.

What he found instead was someone on their hands and knees, coughing. IIb helped him - it was definitely a him, he'd been briefly afraid it might be an it - and sat him on another lump of, yes, almost certainly marble.

'Are you a priest?' he said, fumbling in the rubble.

'I'm Dil. Chief embalmer,' the figure muttered.

'Ptaclusp IIb, paracosmic archi-' IIb began and then, suspecting that architects were not going to be too popular around here for a while, quickly corrected himself. 'I'm an engineer,' he said. 'Are you all right?'

'Don't know. What happened?'

'I think the pyramid exploded,' IIb volunteered.

'Are we dead?'