Interesting Times

'Nah, I only set fire to him a bit.'

'Whut?'

'Teach?'

'Yes, Cohen?'

'Why did you tell that firework merchant that everyone you knew had died suddenly?'

Mr Saveloy's foot tapped gently against the large parcel under the table, alongside a nice new cauldron.

'So he wouldn't get suspicious about what I was buying,' he said.

'Five thousand firecrackers?'

'Whut?'

'Well,' said Mr Saveloy. 'Did I ever tell you that after I taught geography in the Assassins' Guild and the Plumbers' Guild I did it for a few terms in the Alchemists' Guild?'

'Alchemists? Loonies, the lot of them,' said Truckle.

'But they're keen on geography,' said Mr Saveloy. 'I suppose they need to know where they've landed. Eat up, gentlemen. It may be a long night.'

'What is this stuff?' said Truckle, spearing something with his chopstick.

'Er. Chow,' said Mr Saveloy.

'Yes, but what is it?'

'Chow. A kind of… er… dog.'

The Horde looked at him.

'There's nothing wrong with it,' he said hurriedly, with the sincerity of a man who had ordered bamboo shoots and bean curd for himself.

'I've eaten everything else,' said Truckle, 'but I ain't eating dog. I had a dog once. Rover.'

'Yeah,' said Cohen. 'The one with the spiked collar? The one who used to eat people?'

'Say what you like, he was a friend to me,' said Truckle, pushing the meat to one side.

'Rabid death to everyone else. I'll eat yours. Order him some chicken, Teach.'

'Et a man once,' mumbled Mad Hamish. 'In a siege, it were.'

'You ate someone?' said Mr Saveloy, beckoning to the waiter.

'Just a leg.'

'That's terrible!'

'Not with mustard.'

Just when I think I know them, Mr Saveloy mused…

He reached for his wine glass. The Horde reached for their glasses too, while watching him carefully.

'A toast, gentlemen,' he said. 'And remember what I said about not quaffing. Quaffing just gets your ears wet. Just sip. To Civilization!'

The Horde joined in with their own toasts.

''Pcharn'kov!''[22]

''Lie down on the floor and no-one gets hurt!''

''May you live in interesting pants!''

''What's the magic word? Gimmee!''

''Death to most tyrants!''

'Whut?'

'The walls of the Forbidden City are forty feet high,' said Butterfly. 'And the gates are made of brass. There are hundreds of guards. But of course we have the Great Wizard.'

'Who?'

'You.'

'Sorry, I was forgetting.'

'Yes,' said Butterfly, giving Rincewind a long, appraising look. Rincewind remembered tutors giving him a look like that when he'd got high marks in some test by simply guessing at the answers.

He looked down hurriedly at the charcoal scrawls Lotus Blossom had made.

Cohen'd know what to do, he thought. He'd just slaughter his way through. It'd never cross his mind to be afraid or worried. He's the kind of man you need at a time like this.

'No doubt you have magic spells that can blow down the walls,' said Lotus Blossom.

Rincewind wondered what they would do to him when it turned out that he couldn't. Not a lot, he thought, if I'm already running. Of course they could curse his memory and call him names, but he was used to that. Sticks and stones may break my bones, he thought. He was vaguely aware that there was a second half to the saying, but he'd never bothered because the first half always occupied all his attention.

Even the Luggage had left him. That was a minor bright spot, but he missed that patter of little feet…

'Before we start,' he said, 'I think you ought to sing a revolutionary song.'

The cadre liked the idea. Under cover of their chanting he sidled over to Butterfly, who gave him a knowing smile.

'You know I can't do it!'

'The Master said you were very resourceful.'

'I can't magic a hole in a wall!'

'I'm sure you'll think of something. And… Great Wizard?'

'Yes, what?'

'Favourite Pearl, the child with the toy rabbit… '

'Yes?'

'The cadre is all she has. The same goes for many of the others. When the warlords fight, lots of people die. Parents. Do you understand? I was one of the first to read What I Did On My Holidays, Great Wizard, and what I saw in there was a foolish man who for some reason is always lucky. Great Wizard… I hope for everyone's sake you have a great deal of luck. Especially for yours.'

Fountains tinkled in the courts of the Sun Emperor. Peacocks made their call, which sounds like a sound made by something that shouldn't look as beautiful as that. Ornamental trees cast their shade as only they knew how — ornamentally.

The gardens occupied the heart of the city and it was possible to hear the noises from outside, although these were muted because of the straw spread daily on the nearest streets and also because any sound considered too loud would earn its originator a very brief stay in prison.

Of the gardens, the most aesthetically pleasing was the one laid out by the first Emperor, One Sun Mirror. It consisted entirely of gravel and stones, but artfully raked and laid out as it might be by a mountain torrent with a refined artistic sense. It was here that One Sun Mirror, in whose reign the Empire had been unified and the Great Wall built, came to refresh his soul and dwell upon the essential unity of all things, while drinking wine out of the skull of some enemy or possibly a gardener who had been too clumsy with his rake.

At the moment the garden was occupied by Two Little Wang, the Master of Protocol, who came there because he felt it was good for his nerves.

Perhaps it was the number two, he'd always told himself. It was an unlucky birth number. Being called Little Wang was merely a lack-of-courtesy detail, a sort of minor seagull dropping after the great heap of buffalo excrement that Heaven had pasted into his very horoscope. Although he had to admit that he hadn't made things any better by allowing himself to become Master of Protocol.

It had seemed such a good idea at the time. He'd risen gently through the Agatean civil service by mastering those arts essential to the practice of good government and administration (such as calligraphy, origami, flower arranging and the Five Wonderful Forms of poetry). He'd dutifully got on with the tasks assigned to him and noticed only vaguely that there didn't seem to be quite as many high-ranking members of the civil service as there used to be, and then one day a lot of senior mandarins — most of them a lot more senior than he was, it occurred to him later — had rushed up to him while he was trying to find a rhyme for 'orange blossom' and congratulated him on being the new Master.

That had been three months ago.

And of the things that had occurred to him in those intervening three months the most shameful was this: he