Interesting Times

Want another one?' And you could tell the eunuchs,' he added, 'that the Emperor is a lit'ral-minded man and used the phrase 'heads will roll'.'

Twoflower's eyes gleamed behind his cracked glasses. Somehow, he liked the sound of that.

It looked as though he was living in interesting times—

The Luggages sat quietly, and waited.

Fate sat back.

The gods relaxed.

'A draw,' he announced. 'Oh, yes. You have appeared to win in Hunghung but you have had to lose your most valuable piece, is that not so?'

'I'm sorry?' said the Lady. 'I don't quite follow you.'

'Insofar as I understand this… physics…' said Fate, 'I cannot believe that anything could be materialized in the University without dying almost instantly. It is one thing to hit a snowdrift, but quite another to hit a wall.'

'I never sacrifice a pawn,' said the Lady.

'How can you hope to win without sacrificing the occasional pawn?'

'Oh, I never play to win.' She smiled. 'But I do play not to lose. Watch…'

The Council of Wizards gathered in front of the wall at the far end of the Great Hall and stared up at the thing which now covered half of it.

'Interesting effect,' said Ridcully, eventually. 'How fast do you think it was going?'

'About five hundred miles an hour,' said Ponder. 'I think perhaps we were a little enthusiastic. Hex says —'

'From a standing start to five hundred miles an hour?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. 'That must have come as a shock.'

'Yes,' said Ridcully, 'but I suppose it's a mercy for the poor creature that it was such a brief one.'

'And, of course, we must all be thankful that it wasn't Rincewind.'

A couple of the wizards coughed.

The Dean stood back.

'But what is it?' he said.

'Was,' said Ponder Stibbons.

'We could have a look in the Bestiaries,' said Ridcully. 'Shouldn't be hard to find. Grey. Long hind feet like a clown's boots. Rabbit ears. Tail long and pointy. And, of course, not many creatures are twenty feet across, one inch thick and deep fried, so that narrows it down a bit.'

'I don't want to cast a shadow on things,' said the Dean, 'but if this isn't Rincewind, then where is he?'

'I'm sure Mr Stibbons can give us an explanation as to why his calculations went wrong,' said Ridcully.

Ponder's mouth dropped open.

Then he said, as sourly as he dared, 'I probably forgot to take into account that there's three right angles in a triangle, didn't I? Er. I'll have to try and work everything back, but I think that somehow a lateral component was introduced into what should have been a bidirectional sortilegic transfer. It's probably that this was most pronounced at the effective median point, causing an extra node to appear in the transfers at a point equidistant to the other two as prediction in Flume's Third Equation, and Turffe's Law would see to it that the distortion would stabilize in such a way as to create three separate points, each moving a roughly equal mass one jump around the triangle. I'm not sure why the third mass arrived here at such speed, but I think the increased velocity might have been caused by the sudden creation of the node. Of course, it might have been going quite fast anyway. But I shouldn't think it is cooked in its natural state.'

'Do you know,' said Ridcully, 'I think I actually understood some of that? Certainly some of the shorter words.'

'Oh, it's perfectly simple,' said the Bursar brightly. 'We sent the… dog thing to Hunghung. Rincewind was sent to some other place. And this creature was sent here. Just like Pass the Parcel.'

'You see?' said Ridcully to Stibbons. 'You're using language the Bursar can understand. And he's been chasing the dried frog all morning.'

The Librarian staggered into the hall under the weight of a large atlas.

'Oook.'

'At least you can show us where you think our man is,' said Ridcully.

Ponder took a ruler and a pair of compasses out of his hat.

'Well, if we assume Rincewind was in the middle of the Counterweight Continent,' he said, 'then all we need do is draw—'

'Oook!'

'I assure you, I was only going to use pencil—'

'Eeek.'

'All we have to do is imagine, all right, a third point equidistant from the other two… er… that looks like somewhere in the Rim Ocean to me, or probably over the Edge.'

'Can't see that thing in the sea,' said Ridcully, glancing up at the recently laminated corpse.

'In that case, it must have been in the other direction—'

The wizards crowded round.

There was something there.

''S not even properly drawn in,' said the Dean.

'That's because no-one's sure it really exists,' said the Senior Wrangler.

It floated in the middle of the sea, a tiny continent by Discworld standards.

''XXXX',' Ponder read.

'They only put that on the map because no-one knows what it's really called,' said Ridcully.

'And we've sent him there,' said Ponder. 'A place that we're not even certain exists?'

'Oh, we know it exists now,' said Ridcully. 'Must do. Must do. Must be a pretty rich land, too, if the rats grow that big.'

'I'll go and see if we can bring—' Ponder began.

'Oh, no,' said Ridcully firmly. 'No, thank you very much. Next time it might be an elephant whizzing over our heads, and those things make a splash. No. Give the poor chap a rest. We'll have to think of something else…'

He rubbed his hands together. 'Time for dinner, I feel,' he said.

'Um,' said the Senior Wrangler. 'Do you think we were wise to light that string when we sent the thing back?'

'Certainly,' said Ridcully, as they strolled away. 'No-one could say we didn't return it in exactly the same state as it arrived…'

Hex dreamed gently in its room.

The wizards were right. Hex couldn't think.

There weren't words, yet, for what it could do.

Even Hex didn't know what it could do.

But it was going to find out.

The quill pen scritched and blotted its way over a fresh sheet of paper and drew, for no good reason, a calendar for the year surmounted by a rather angular picture of a beagle, standing on its hind legs.

The ground was red, just like at Hunghung. But whereas that was a kind of clay so rich that leaving a chair on the lawn meant that you had four small trees by nightfall, this ground was sand that looked as if it had got red by being baked in a million-year summer.

There were occasional clumps of yellowed grass and low stands of grey-green trees. But what there was everywhere was heat.