A fine film of plaster dust drifted down on to the desk of Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor of Unseen University; just as he was trying to tie a particularly difficult fly.
He glanced out of the stained-glass window. A smoke cloud was rising over uptown Morpork.
'Bursaar!'
The Bursar arrived within a few seconds, out of breath. Loud noises always upset him.
'It's the alchemists, Master,' he panted.
'That's the third time this week. Blasted firework merchants,' muttered the Archchancellor.
'I'm afraid so, Master,' said the Bursar.
'What do they think they're doing?'
'I really couldn't say, Master,' said the Bursar, getting his breath back. 'Alchemy has never interested me. It's altogether too . . . too . . . '
'Dangerous,' said the Archchancellor firmly. 'Lot of damn mixin' things up and saying, hey, what'll happen if we add a drop of the yellow stuff, and then goin' around without yer eyebrows for a fortnight.'
'I was going to say impractical,' said the Bursar. 'Trying to do things the hard way when we have perfectly simple everyday magic available.'
'I thought they were trying to cure the philosopher's stones, or somethin',' said the Archchancellor. 'Lot of damn nonsense, if you ask me. Anyway, I'm off.'
As the Archchancellor began to sidle out of the room the Bursar hastily waved a handful of papers at him.
'Before you go, Archchancellor,' he said desperately, 'I wonder if you would just care to sign a few-'
'Not now, man,' snapped the Archchancellor. 'Got to see a man about a horse, what?'
'What?'
'Right.' The door closed.
The Bursar stared at it, and sighed.
Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones - they'd come, they'd served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they'd died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of longterm employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
However, from the Bursar's point of view this didn't really have to matter. The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor and the Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first.
This one was different. For one thing, he was hardly ever in, except to change out of his muddy clothes. And he shouted at people. Usually at the Bursar.
And yet, at the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn't set foot in the University in forty years.
There had been so much in-fighting between the various orders of wizardry in recent years that, just for once, the senior wizards had agreed that what the University needed was a period of stability, so that they could get on with their scheming and intriguing in peace and quiet for a few months. A search of the records turned up Ridcully the Brown who, after becoming a Seventh Level mage at the incredibly young age of twenty-seven, had quit the University in order to look after his family's estates deep in the country.
He looked ideal.
'Just the chap,' they all said. 'Clean sweep. New broom. A country wizard. Back to the thingumajigs, the roots of wizardry. Jolly old boy with a pipe and twinkly eyes. Sort of chap who can tell one herb from another, roams-the-high-forest-with-every-beast-his-brother kind of thing. Sleeps under the stars, like as not. Knows what the wind is saying, we shouldn't wonder. Got a name for all the trees, you can bank on it. Speaks to the birds, too.'
A messenger had been sent. Ridcully the Brown had sighed, cursed a bit, found his staff in the kitchen garden where it had been supporting a scarecrow, and had set out.
'And if he's any problem,' the wizards had added, in the privacy of their own heads, 'anyone who talks to trees should be no trouble to get rid of.'
And then he'd arrived, and it turned out that Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was, 'Winged you, yer bastard!'
The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They'd got so good at patternrecognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they'd run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.
Within twelve hours of arriving, Ridcully had installed a pack of hunting dragons in the butler's pantry, fired his dreadful crossbow at the ravens on the ancient Tower of Art, drunk a dozen bottles of red wine, and rolled off to bed at two in the morning singing a song with words in it that some of the older and more forgetful wizards had to look up.