Sourcery - Страница 45

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‘What does “apocrustic” mean?’ said Pestilence, gazing intently into some inner world.

‘Astringent,’ said War. ‘I think.’

‘It’s not that, then?’

‘Shouldn’t think so,’ said Famine, glumly.

There was another long, embarrassed silence.

‘Better have ’nother drink,’ said War, pulling himself together.

‘S’right.’

———

About fifty miles away and several hundred feet up, Conina at last managed to control her stolen horse and brought it to a gentle trot on the empty air, displaying some of the most determined nonchalance the Disc had ever seen.

‘Snow?’ she said.

Clouds were roaring soundlessly from the direction of the Hub. They were fat and heavy and shouldn’t be moving so fast. Blizzards trailed beneath them, covering the landscape like a sheet.

It didn’t look like the kind of snow that whispers down gently in the pit of the night and in the morning turns the landscape into a glittering wonderland of uncommon and ethereal beauty. It looked like the kind of snow that intends to make the world as bloody cold as possible.

‘Bit late in the year,’ said Nijel. He glanced downwards, and then immediately closed his eyes.

Creosote watched in delighted astonishment. ‘Is that how it happens?’ he said. ‘I’ve only heard about it in stories. I thought it sprouted out of the ground somehow. Bit like mushrooms, I thought.’

‘Those clouds aren’t right,’ said Conina.

‘Do you mind if we go down now?’ said Nijel weakly. ‘Somehow it didn’t look so bad when we were moving.’

Conina ignored this. ‘Try the lamp,’ she commanded. ‘I want to know about this.’

Nijel fumbled in his pack and produced the lamp.

The voice of the genie sounded rather tinny and far off, and said: ‘If you would care to relax a little … trying to connect you.’ There then followed some tinkly little music, the kind that perhaps a Swiss chalet would make if you could play it, before a trapdoor outlined itself in the air and the genie himself appeared. He looked around him, and then at them.

‘Oh, wow,’ he said.

‘Something’s happening to the weather,’ said Conina. ‘Why?’

‘You mean you don’t know?’ said the genie.

‘We’re asking you, aren’t we?’

‘Well, I’m no judge, but it rather looks like the Apocralypse, yuh?’

‘What?’

The genie shrugged. ‘The gods have vanished, okay?’ he said. ‘And according to, you know, legend, that means—’

‘The Ice Giants,’ said Nijel, in a horrified whisper.

‘Speak up,’ said Creosote.

‘The Ice Giants,’ Nijel repeated loudly, with a trace of irritation. ‘The gods keep them imprisoned, see. At the Hub. But at the end of the world they’ll break free at last, and ride out on their dreadful glaciers and regain their ancient domination, crushing out the flames of civilisation until the world lies naked and frozen under the terrible cold stars until Time itself freezes over. Or something like that, apparently.’

‘But it isn’t time for the Apocralypse,’ said Conina desperately. ‘I mean, a dreadful ruler has to arise, there must be a terrible war, the four dreadful horsemen have to ride, and then the Dungeon Dimensions will break into the world—’ She stopped, her face nearly as white as the snow.

‘Being buried under a thousand-foot ice sheet sounds awfully like it, anyway,’ said the genie. He reached forward and snatched his lamp out of Nijel’s hands.

‘Mucho apologies,’ he said, ‘but it’s time to liquidise my assets in this reality. See you around. Or something.’ He vanished up to the waist, and then with a faint last cry of ‘Shame about lunch’, disappeared entirely.

The three riders peered through the veils of driving snow towards the Hub.

‘It may be my imagination,’ said Creosote, ‘but can either of you hear a sort of creaking and groaning?’

‘Shut up,’ said Conina distractedly.

Creosote leaned over and patted her hand.

‘Cheer up,’ he said, ‘it’s not the end of the world.’ He thought about this statement for a bit, and then added, ‘Sorry. Just a figure of speech.’

‘What are we going to do?’ she wailed.

Nijel drew himself up.

‘I think,’ he said, ‘that we should go and explain.’

They turned towards him with the kind of expression normally reserved for messiahs or extreme idiots.

‘Yes,’ he said, with a shade more confidence. ‘We should explain.’

‘Explain to the Ice Giants?’ said Conina.

‘Yes.’

‘Sorry,’ said Conina, ‘have I got this right? You think we should go and find the terrifying Ice Giants and sort of tell them that there are a lot of warm people out here who would rather they didn’t sweep across the world crushing everyone under mountains of ice, and could they sort of reconsider things? Is that what you think we should do?’

‘Yes. That’s right. You’ve got it exactly.’

Conina and Creosote exchanged glances. Nijel remained sitting proudly in the saddle, a faint smile on his face.

‘Is your geese giving you trouble?’ said the Seriph.

‘Geas,’ said Nijel calmly. ‘It’s not giving me trouble, it’s just that I must do something brave before I die.’

‘That’s it though,’ said Creosote. ‘That’s the whole rather sad point. You’ll do something brave, and then you’ll die.’

‘What alternative have we got?’ said Nijel.

They considered this.

‘I don’t think I’m much good at explaining,’ said Conina, in a small voice.

‘I am,’ said Nijel, firmly. ‘I’m always having to explain.’

———

The scattered particles of what had been Rincewind’s mind pulled themselves together and drifted up through the layers of dark unconsciousness like a three-day corpse rising to the surface.

It probed its most recent memories, in much the same way that one might scratch a fresh scab.

He could recall something about a staff, and a pain so intense that it appeared to insert a chisel between every cell in his body and hammer on it repeatedly.

He remembered the staff fleeing, dragging him after it. And then there had been that dreadful bit where Death had appeared and reached past him, and the staff had twisted and become suddenly alive and Death had said, IPSLORE THE RED, I HAVE YOU NOW.

And now there was this.

By the feel of it Rincewind was lying on sand. It was very cold.

He took the risk of seeing something horrible and opened his eyes.

The first thing he saw was his left arm and, surprisingly, his hand. It was its normal grubby self. He had expected to see a stump.

It seemed to be night-time. The beach, or whatever it was, stretched on towards a line of distant low mountains, under night sky frosted with a million white stars.

A little closer to him there was a rough line in the silvery sand. He lifted his head slightly and saw the scatter of molten droplets. They were octiron, a metal so intrinsically magical that no forge on the Disc could even warm it up.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘We won, then.’

He flopped down again.

After a while his right hand came up automatically and patted the top of his head. Then it patted the sides of his head. Then it began to grope, with increasing urgency, in the sand around him.

Eventually it must have communicated its concern to the rest of Rincewind, because he pulled himself upright and said, ‘Oh, bugger.’

There seemed to be no hat anywhere. But he could see a small white shape lying very still in the sand a little way away and, further off— A column of daylight.

It hummed and swayed in the air, a three-dimensional hole into somewhere else. Occasional flurries of snow blew out of it. He could see skewed images in the light, that might be buildings or landscapes warped by the weird curvature. But he couldn’t see them very clearly, because of the tall, brooding shadows that surrounded it.

The human mind is an astonishing thing. It can operate on several levels at once. And, in fact, while Rincewind had been wasting his intellect in groaning and looking for his hat, an inner part of his brain had been observing, assessing, analysing and comparing.

Now it crept up to his cerebellum, tapped it on the shoulder, thrust a message into its hand and ran for it.

The message ran something like this: I hope I find me well. The last trial of magic has been too much for the tortured fabric of reality. It has opened a hole. I am in the Dungeon Dimensions. And the things in front of me are … the Things. It has been nice knowing me.

The particular thing nearest Rincewind was at least twenty feet high. It looked like a dead horse that had been dug up after three months and then introduced to a range of new experiences, at least one of which had included an octopus.

It hadn’t noticed Rincewind. It was too busy concentrating on the light.

Rincewind crawled back to the still body of Coin and nudged it gently.

‘Are you alive?’ he said. ‘If you’re not, I’d prefer it if you didn’t answer.’

Coin rolled over and stared up at him with puzzled eyes. After a while he said, ‘I remember—’

‘Best not to,’ said Rincewind.

The boy’s hand groped vaguely in the sand beside him.

‘It isn’t here any more,’ said Rincewind, quietly. The hand stopped its searching.

Rincewind helped Coin to sit up. He looked blankly at the cold silver sand, then at the sky, then at the distant Things, and then at Rincewind.