The Colour of Magic

‘You’re so small,’ finished Twoflower.

‘I see’, said the troll carefully. ‘Personal remarks now.’ He drew himself up to his full height, which was currently about four feet. ‘Just because I’m made of water doesn’t mean I’m made of wood, you know.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Twoflower, climbing hastily out of the furs.

‘You’re made of dirt,’ said the troll, ‘but I didn’t pass comments about things you can’t help, did I? Oh, no. We can’t help the way the Creator made us, that’s my view. But if you must know, your moon here is rather more powerful than the ones around my own world.’

‘The moon?’ said Twoflower. ‘I don’t under—’

‘If I’ve got to spell it out,’ said the troll, testily, ‘I’m suffering from chronic tides.’

A bell jangled in the darkness of the shack. Tethis strode across the creaking floor to the complicated devices of levers, strings and bells that was mounted on the Circumfence’s topmost strand where it passed through the hut.

The bell rang again, and then started to clang away in an odd jerky rhythm for several minutes. The troll stood with his ear pressed close to it.

When it stopped he turned slowly and looked at them with a worried frown.

‘You’re more important than I thought,’ he said. ‘You’re not to wait for the salvage fleet. You’re to be collected by a flyer. That’s what they say in Krull.’ He shrugged. ‘And I hadn’t even sent a message that you’re here, yet. Someone’s been drinking vul nut wine again.’

He picked up a large mallet that hung on a pillar beside the bell and used it to tap out a brief carillon.

‘That’ll be passed from lengthman to lengthman all the way back to Krull,’ he said. ‘Marvellous really, isn’t it?’

* * *

It came speeding across the sea, floating a man-length above it, but still leaving a foaming wake as whatever power that held it up smacked brutally into the water. Rincewind knew what power held it up. He was, he would be the first to admit, a coward, an incompetent, and not even very good at being a failure; but he was still a wizard of sorts, he knew one of the Eight Great Spells, he would be claimed by Death himself when he died, and he recognised really finely honed magic when he saw it.

The lens skimming towards the island was perhaps twenty feet across, and totally transparent. Sitting around its circumference were a large number of black-robed men, each one strapped securely to the disc by a leather harness and each one staring down at the waves with an expression so tormented, so agonising, that the transparent disc seemed to be ringed with gargoyles.

Rincewind sighed with relief. This was such an unusual sound that it made Twoflower take his eyes off the approaching disc and turn them on him.

‘We’re important, no lie,’ explained Rincewind. ‘They wouldn’t be wasting all that magic on a couple of potential slaves.’ He grinned.

‘What is it?’ said Twoflower.

‘Well, the disc itself would have been created by Fresnel’s Wonderful Concentrator,’ said Rincewind, authoritatively.^{43} ‘That calls for many rare and unstable ingredients, such as demon’s breath and so forth, and it takes at least eight fourthgrade wizards a week to envision. Then there’s those wizards on it, who must all be gifted hydrophobes—’

‘You mean they hate water?’ said Twoflower.

‘No, that wouldn’t work,’ said Rincewind. ‘Hate is an attracting force, just like love. They really loathe it, the very idea of it revolts them. A really good hydrophobe has to be trained on dehydrated water from birth. I mean, that costs a fortune in magic alone. But they make great weather magicians. Rain clouds just give up and go away.’

‘It sounds terrible,’ said the water troll behind them.

‘And they all die young,’ said Rincewind, ignoring him. ‘They just can’t live with themselves.’

‘Sometimes I think a man could wander across the disc all his life and not see everything there is to see,’ said Twoflower. ‘And now it seems there are lots of other worlds as well. When I think I might die without seeing a hundredth of all there is to see it makes me feel,’ he paused, then added, ‘well, humble, I suppose. And very angry, of course.’

The flyer halted a few yards hubward of the island, throwing up a sheet of spray. It hung there, spinning slowly. A hooded figure standing by the stubby pillar at the exact centre of the lens beckoned to them.

‘You’d better wade out,’ said the troll. ‘It doesn’t do to keep them waiting. It has been nice to make your acquaintance.’ He shook them both, wetly, by the hand. As he waded out a little way with them the two nearest loathers on the lens shied away with expressions of extreme disgust.

The hooded figure reached down with one hand and released a rope ladder. In its other hand it held a silver rod, which had about it the unmistakable air of something designed for killing people. Rincewind’s first impression was reinforced when the figure raised the stick and waved it carelessly towards the shore. A section of rock vanished, leaving a small grey haze of nothingness.

‘That’s so you don’t think I’m afraid to use it,’ said the figure.

‘Don’t think you’re afraid?’ said Rincewind. The hooded figure snorted.

‘We know all about you, Rincewind the magician. You are a man of great cunning and artifice. You laugh in the face of Death. Your affected air of craven cowardice does not fool me.’

It fooled Rincewind. ‘I—’ he began, and paled as the nothingness-stick was turned towards him. ‘I see you know all about me,’ he finished weakly, and sat down heavily on the slippery surface. He and Twoflower, under instructions from the hooded commander, strapped themselves down to rings set in the transparent disc.

‘If you make the merest suggestion of weaving a spell,’ said the darkness under the hood, ‘you die. Third quadrant reconcile, ninth quadrant redouble, forward all!’

A wall of water shot into the air behind Rincewind and the disc jerked suddenly. The dreadful presence of the sea troll had probably concentrated the hydrophobes’ minds wonderfully, because it then rose at a very steep angle and didn’t begin level flight until it was a dozen fathoms above the waves. Rincewind glanced down through the transparent surface and wished he hadn’t.

‘Well, off again then,’ said Twoflower cheerfully. He turned and waved at the troll, now no more than a speck on the edge of the world.

Rincewind glared at him. ‘Doesn’t anything ever worry you?’ he asked.

‘We’re still alive, aren’t we?’ asked Twoflower. ‘And you yourself said they wouldn’t be going to all this trouble if we were just going to be slaves. I expect Tethis was exaggerating. I expect it’s all a misunderstanding. I expect we’ll be sent home. After we’ve seen Krull, of course. And I must say it all sounds fascinating.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Rincewind, in a hollow voice. ‘Fascinating.’ He was thinking: I’ve seen excitement, and I’ve seen boredom. And boredom was best.

* * *

Had either of them happened to look down at that moment they would have noticed a strange v-shaped wave surging through the water far below them, its apex pointing directly at Tethis’ island. But they weren’t looking. The twenty-four hydrophobic magicians were looking, but to them it was just another piece of dreadfulness, not really any different from the liquid horror around it. They were probably right.

* * *

Sometime before all this the blazing pirate ship had hissed under the waves and started the long slow slide towards the distant ooze. It was more distant than average, because directly under the stricken keel was the Gorunna Trench—a chasm in the Disc’s surface that was so black, so deep and so reputedly evil that even the krakens went there fearfully, and in pairs. In less reputedly evil chasms the fish went about with natural lights on their heads and on the whole managed quite well. In Gorunna they left them unlit and, insofar as it is possible for something without legs to creep, they crept; they tended to bump into things, too. Horrible things.

The water around the ship turned from green to purple, from purple to black, from black to a darkness so complete that blackness itself seemed merely grey by comparison. Most of its timbers had already been crushed into splinters under the intense pressure.

It spiralled past groves of nightmare polyps and drifting forests of seaweed which glowed with faint,