with his teeth.
In his right hand he carries the magical black sword Kring, which was forged from a thunderbolt and had a soul but suffers no scabbard. Hrun had stolen it only three days before from the impregnable palace of the Archmandrite of B’Ituni, and he was already regretting it. It was beginning to get on his nerves.
‘I tell you it went down that last passage on the right,’ hissed Kring in a voice like the scrape of a blade over stone.
‘Be silent!’
‘All I said was—’
‘Shut up!’
And Twoflower …
He was lost, he knew that. Either the building was much bigger than it looked, or he was now on some wide underground level without having gone down any steps, or—as he was beginning to suspect—the inner dimensions of the place disobeyed a fairly basic rule of architecture by being bigger than the outside. And why all these strange lights? They were eight-sided crystals set at regular intervals in the walls and ceiling, and they shed a rather unpleasant glow that didn’t so much illuminate as outline the darkness.
And whoever had done those carvings on the wall, Twoflower thought charitably, had probably been drinking too much. For years.
On the other hand, it was certainly a fascinating building. Its builders had been obsessed with the number eight. The floor was a continuous mosaic of eight-sided tiles, the corridor walls were angled{23} to give the corridors eight sides if the walls and ceilings were counted and, in those places where part of the masonry had fallen in, Twoflower noticed that even the stones themselves had eight sides.
‘I don’t like it,’ said the picture imp, from his box around Twoflower’s neck.
‘Why not?’ inquired Twoflower.
‘It’s weird.’
‘But you’re a demon. Demons can’t call things weird. I mean, what’s weird to a demon?’
‘Oh, you know,’ said the demon cautiously, glancing around nervously and shifting from claw to claw. ‘Things. Stuff.’
Twoflower looked at him sternly. ‘What things?’
The demon coughed nervously [14].
‘Oh, things,’ it said wretchedly. ‘Evil things. Things we don’t talk about is the point I’m broadly trying to get across, master.’
Twoflower shook his head wearily. ‘I wish Rincewind was here,’ he said. ‘He’d know what to do.’
‘
Twoflower looked up at the ceiling.
‘What was that?’ he asked. ‘Didn’t you hear something?’
‘Me? Hear? No! Not a thing!’ the demon insisted. It jerked back into its box and slammed the door. Twoflower tapped on it. The door opened a crack.
‘It sounded like a stone moving,’ he explained. The door banged shut. Twoflower shrugged.
‘The place is probably falling to bits,’ he said to himself. He stood up.
‘I say!’ he shouted. ‘Is anyone there?’
Air, Air, air, replied the dark tunnels.
‘Hullo?’ he tried.
lo, Lo, lo.
‘I know there’s someone here, I just heard you playing dice!’
ice, Ice, ice.
‘Look, I had just—’
Twoflower stopped. The reason for this was the bright point of light that had popped into existence a few feet from his eyes. It grew rapidly, and after a few seconds was the tiny bright shape of a man. At this stage it began to make a noise, or, rather, Twoflower started to hear the noise it had been making all along. It sounded like a sliver of a scream, caught in one long instant of time.
The iridescent man was doll-sized now, a tortured shape tumbling in slow motion while hanging in mid-air. Twoflower wondered why he had thought of the phrase ‘a sliver of a scream’ … and began to wish he hadn’t.
It was beginning to look like Rincewind. The wizard’s mouth was open, and his face was brilliantly lit by the light of—what? Strange suns, Twoflower found himself thinking. Suns men don’t usually see. He shivered.
Now the turning wizard was half man-size. At that point the growth was faster, there was a sudden crowded moment, a rush of air, and an explosion of sound. Rincewind tumbled out of the air, screaming. He hit the floor hard, choked, then rolled over with his head cradled in his arms and his body curled up tightly.
When the dust had settled Twoflower reached out gingerly and tapped the wizard on the shoulder. The human ball rolled up tighter.
‘It’s me,’ explained Twoflower helpfully. The wizard unrolled a fraction.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Me.’
In one movement Rincewind unrolled and bounced up in front of the little man, his hands gripping his shoulders desperately. His eyes were wild and wide.
‘Don’t say it!’ he hissed. ‘Don’t say it and we might get out! ‘
‘Get out? How did you get in? Don’t you know—’
‘Don’t say it!’
Twoflower backed away from this madman.
‘Don’t say it!’
‘Don’t say what?’
‘The number.’
‘Number?’ said Twoflower. ‘Hey, Rincewind—’
‘Yes, number! Between seven and nine. Four plus four!’
‘What, ei—’
Rincewind’s hands clapped over the man’s mouth. ‘Say it and we’re doomed. Just don’t think about, right. Trust me!’
‘I don’t understand!’ wailed Twoflower. Rincewind relaxed slightly, which was to say that he still made a violin string look like a bowl of jelly.
‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let’s try and get out. And I’ll try and tell you.’
After the first Age of Magic the disposal of grimoires{24} began to become a severe problem on the discworld. A spell is still a spell even when imprisoned temporarily in parchment and ink. It has potency. This is not a problem while the book’s owner still lives, but on his death the spell book becomes a source of uncontrolled power that cannot easily be defused.
In short, spell books leak magic. Various solutions have been tried. Countries near the Rim simply loaded down the books of dead mages with leaden pentalghas and threw them over the Edge. Near the Hub less satisfactory alternatives were available. Inserting the offending books in canisters of negatively polarised octiron and sinking them in the fathomless depths of the sea was one [15] but before long the magic seeped out and eventually fishermen complained of shoals of invisible fish or psychic clams.
A temporary solution was the construction, in various centres of magical lore, of large rooms made of denatured octiron, which is impervious to most forms of magic. Here the more critical grimoires could be stored until their potency had attenuated.
That was how there came to be at Unseen University the Octavo, greatest of all grimoires, formerly owned by the Creator of the Universe. It was this book that Rincewind had once opened for a bet. He had only a second to stare at a page before setting off various alarm spells, but that was time enough for one spell to leap from it and settle in his memory like a toad in a stone.
