At one side of the clearing three tiny red points of light-glowed momentarily and there was the sound of a chesty cough, abruptly silenced.
'Shut up!' hissed a third rank wizard. They'll hear us!'
'Who will? We gave the lads from the Brotherhood of the Hoodwink the slip in the swamp, and those idiots from the Venerable Council of Seers went off the wrong way anyway.'
'Yeah,' said the most junior wizard, 'but who keeps talking to us? They say this is a magic wood, it's full of goblins and wolves and —'
'Trees,' said a voice out of the darkness, high above. It possessed what can only be described as timbre.
'Yeah,' said the youngest wizard. He sucked on his dogend, and shivered.
The leader of the party peered over the rock and watched the cottage.
'Right then,' he said, knocking out his pipe on the heel of his seven league boot, who squeaked in protest. 'We rush in, we grab them, we're away. Okay?'
'You sure it's just people?' said the youngest wizard, nervously.
'Of course I'm sure,' snarled the leader. 'What do you expect, three bears?'
'There could be monsters. This is the sort of wood that 45 has monsters.'
'And trees,' said a friendly voice from the branches. 'Yeah,' said the leader, cautiously.
Rincewind looked carefully at the bed. It was quite a nice little bed, in a sort of hard toffee inlaid with caramel, but he'd rather eat it than sleep in it and it looked as though someone already had.
'Someone's been eating my bed,' he said.
'I like toffee,' said Twoflower defensively.
'If you don't watch out the fairy will come and take all your teeth away,' said Rincewind.
'No, that's elves,' said Swires from the dressing table. 'Elves do that. Toenails, too. Very touchy at times, elves can be.'
Twoflower sat down heavily on his bed.
'You've got it wrong,' he said. 'Elves are noble and beautiful and wise and fair; I'm sure I read that somewhere.'
Swires and Rincewind's kneecap exchanged glances.
'I think you must be thinking about different elves,' the gnome said slowly. 'We've just got the other sort around here. Not that you could call them quick-tempered,' he added hastily. 'Not if you didn't want to take your teeth home in your hat, anyway.'
There was the tiny, distinctive sound of a nougat door opening. At the same time, from the other side of the cottage, came the faintest of tinkles, like a rock smashing a barley sugar window as delicately as possible.
'What was that?' said Twoflower.
'Which one?' said Rincewind.
There was the clonk of a heavy branch banging against the window sill. With a cry of 'Elves!' Swires scuttled across the floor to a mousehole and vanished.
'What shall we do?' said Twoflower.
'Panic?' said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry sabre-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying 'What a magnificent brute!' and 'Here, pussy.'
'There's a cupboard,' said Twoflower, pointing to a narrow door that was squeezed between the wall and the chimneybreast. They scrambled into sweet, musty darkness.
There was the creak of a chocolate floorboard outside. Someone said 'I heard voices.'
Someone else said, 'Yeah, downstairs. I think it's the Hood winkers.'
'I thought you said we'd given them the slip!'
'Hey, you two, you can eat this place! Here, look you can —'
'Shut up!'
There was a lot more creaking, and a muffled scream from downstairs where a Venerable Seer, creeping carefully through the darkness from the broken window, had trodden on the fingers of a Hoodwinker who was hiding under the table. There was the sudden zip and zing of magic.
'Bugger!'said a voice outside. They've got him! Let's go!'
There was more creaking, and then silence. After a while Twoflower said, 'Rincewind, I think there's a broomstick in this cupboard.'
Well, what's so unusual about that?'
This one's got handlebars.'
There was a piercing shriek from below. In the darkness a wizard had tried to open the Luggage's lid. A crash from the scullery indicated the sudden arrival of a party of Illuminated Mages of the Unbroken Circle.
'What do you think they're after?' whispered Twoflower.
'I don't know, but I think it might be a good idea not to find out,' said Rincewind thoughtfully.
'You could be right.'
Rincewind pushed open the door gingerly. The room was empty. He tiptoed across to the window, and looked own into the upturned faces of three Brothers of the Order of Midnight.
'That's him!'
He drew back hurriedly and rushed for the stairs.
The scene below was indescribable but since that statement would earn the death penalty in the reign of Olaf Quimby II the attempt better be made. Firstly, most of the struggling wizards were trying to illuminate the scene by various flames, fireballs and magical glows, so the overall lighting gave the impression of a disco in a strobelight factory; each man was trying to find a position from which he could see the rest of the room without being attacked himself, and absolutely everyone was trying to keep out of the way of the Luggage, which had two Venerable Seers pinned in a corner and was snapping its lid at anyone who approached. But one wizard did happen to look up.
'It's him!'
Rincewind jerked back, and something bumped into him. He looked around hurriedly, and stared when he saw Twoflower sitting on the broomstick – which was floating in mid-air.
'The witch must have left it behind!' said Twoflower. 'A genuine magic broomstick!'
Rincewind hesitated. Octarine sparks were spitting off the broomstick's bristles and he hated heights almost more than anything else, but what he really hated more than anything at all was a dozen very angry and bad-tempered wizards rushing up the stairs towards him, and this was happening.
'All right,' he said, 'but I'll drive.'
He lashed out with a boot at a wizard who was halfway through a Spell of Binding and jumped onto the broomstick, which bobbed down the stairwell and then turned upside down so that Rincewind was horribly eye to eye with a Brother of Midnight.
He yelped and gave the handlebars a convulsive twist.
Several things happened at once. The broomstick shot orward and broke through the wall in a shower of crumbs: the Luggage surged forward and bit the Brother in the leg: and with a strange whistling sound an arrow appeared from nowhere, missed Rincewind by inches, and struck the Luggage's lid with a very solid thud. The Luggage vanished.
In a little village deep in the forest an ancient shaman threw a few more twigs on his fire and stared through the smoke at his shamefaced apprentice.
'A box with legs on?' he said.
'Yes, master. It just appeared out of the sky and looked at me,' said the apprentice.
'It had eyes then, this box?'
'N—,' began the apprentice and stopped, puzzled. The old man frowned.
'Many have seen Topaxci, God of the Red Mushroom, and they earn the name of shaman,' he said. 'Some have seen Skelde, spirit of the smoke, and they are called sorcerers. A few have been privileged to see Umcherrel, the soul of the forest, and they are known as spirit masters. But none have seen a box with hundreds of legs that looked at them without eyes, and they are known as idio—'
The interruption was caused by a sudden screaming noise and a flurry of snow and sparks that blew the fire across the dark hut; there was a brief blurred vision and then the opposite wall was blasted aside and the apparition vanished.
There was a long silence. Then a slightly shorter silence. Then the old shaman said carefully, 'You didn't just see two men go through upside down on a broomstick, shouting and screaming at each other, did you?'
The boy looked at him levelly. 'Certainly not,' he said.
The old man heaved a sigh of relief. Thank goodness for that,' he said. 'Neither did I.'
The cottage was in turmoil, because not only did the wizards want to follow the broomstick, they also wanted to prevent each other from doing so, and this led to several regrettable incidents.The most spectacular, and certainly the most tragic, happened when one Seer attempted to use his seven league boots without the proper sequence of spells and preparations. Seven league boots, as has already been intimated, are a tricksy form of magic at best, and he remembered too late that the utmost caution must be taken in using a means of transport which, when all is said and done, relies for its effectiveness on trying to put one foot twenty-one miles in front of the other.
The first snowstorms of winter were raging, and in fact there was a suspiciously heavy covering of cloud over most of the Disc. And yet, from far above and by the silver light of the discworld's tiny moon, it presented one of the most beautiful sights in the multiverse.
Great streamers of cloud, hundreds of miles along, swirled from the waterfall at the Rim to the mountains of the Hub. In the cold crystal silence the huge white spiral glittered frostily under the stars, imperceptibly turning, very much as though God had stirred His coffee and then poured the cream in.
Nothing disturbed the glowing scene, which —
Something small and distant broke through the cloud layer, trailing shreds of vapour. In the stratospheric calm the sounds of bickering came sharp and clear.
'You said you could fly one of these things!'
'No I didn't; I just said you couldn't!'
'But I've never been on one before!'
'What a coincidence!'
'Anyway, you said— look at the sky!'
'No I didn't!'
'What's happened to the stars?'
And so it was that Rincewind and Twoflower became the first two people on the Disc to see what the future held.
A thousand miles behind them the Hub mountain of Cori Celesti stabbed the sky and cast a knife-bright shadow across the broiling clouds, so that Gods ought to have noticed too – but the Gods don't normally look at the sky and in any case were engaged in litigation with the Ice Giants, who had refused to turn their radio down.
Rimwards, in the direction of Great A'Tuin's travel, the sky had been swept of stars.
In that circle of blackness there was just one star, a red and baleful star, a star like the glitter in the eyesocket of a rabid mink. It was small and horrible and uncompromising. And the Disc was being carried straight towards it.
Rincewind knew precisely what to do in these circumstances. He screamed and pointed the broomstick straight down.
Galder Weatherwax stood in the centre of the octogram and raised his hands.
'Urshalo, dileptor, c'hula, do my bidding!'
A small mist formed over his head. He glanced sideways at Trymon, who was sulking at the edge of the magic circle.
'This next bit's quite impressive,' he said. 'Watch. Kot-b'hai! Kot-sham! To me, o spirits of small isolated rocks and worried mice not less than three inches long!'
'What?' said Trymon.
That bit took quite a lot of research,' agreed Galder, especially the mice. Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes . . .'
He raised his arms again. Trymon watched him, and licked his lips distractedly. The old fool was really concentrating, bending his mind entirely to the Spell and hardly paying any attention to Trymon.
Words of power rolled around the room, bouncing off the walls and scuttling out of sight behind shelves and jars. Trymon hesitated.
Galder shut his eyes momentarily, his face a mask of ecstacy as he mouthed the final word.
Trymon tensed, his fingers curling around the knife again. And Galder opened one eye, nodded at him and sent a sideways blast of power that picked the younger man up and sent him sprawling against the wall.