Eric

His head ached. He felt it was several weeks past his bedtime. But he had to say something.

“Gentlemen—” he began.

“Oook.”

“Sorry, and mo—”

“Oook.”

“I mean apes, of course—”

“Oook.”

The Archchancellor opened and shut his mouth in silence for a while, trying to re-route his train of thought. The Librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptitiously looked very hard for one.

“It’s a haunting,” he ventured. “Some sort of a ghost, maybe. A bell, book and candle job.”

The Bursar sighed. “We tried that, Archchancellor.”

The Archchancellor leaned towards him.

“Eh?” he said.

“I said, we tried that, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar loudly, directing his voice at the old man’s ear. “After dinner, you remember? We used Humptemper’s Names of the Ants and rang Old Tom.”[3]

“Did we, indeed. Worked, did it?”

“No, Archchancellor.”

“Eh?”

“Anyway, we’ve never had any trouble with ghosts before,” said the Senior Tutor. “Wizards just don’t haunt places.”

The Archchancellor groped for a crumb of comfort.

“Perhaps it’s just something natural,” he said. “Possibly the rumblings of an underground spring. Earth movements, perhaps. Something in the drains. They can make very funny noises, you know, when the wind is in the right direction.”

He sat back and beamed.

The rest of the council exchanged glances.

“The drains don’t sound like hurrying feet, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar wearily.

“Unless someone left a tap running,” said the Senior Tutor.

The Bursar scowled at him. He’d been in the tub when the invisible screaming thing had hurtled through his room. It was not an experience he wanted to repeat.

The Archchancellor nodded at him.

“That’s settled, then,” he said, and fell asleep.

The Bursar watched him in silence: Then he pulled the old man’s hat off and tucked it gently under his head.

“Well?” he said wearily. “Has anyone got any suggestions?”

The Librarian put his hand up.

“Oook,” he said.

“Yes, well done, good boy,” said the Bursar, breezily. “Anyone else?”

The orang-utan glared at him as the other wizards shook their heads.

“It’s a tremor in the texture of reality,” said the Senior Tutor. “That’s what it is.”

“What should we do about it, then?”

“Search me. Unless we tried the old—”

“Oh, no,” said the Bursar. “Don’t say it. Please. It’s far too dangerous—”

His words were chopped off by a scream that began at the far end of the room and dopplered along the table, accompanied by the sound of many running feet. The wizards ducked in a scatter of overturned chairs.

The candle flames were drawn into long thin tongues of octarine light before being snuffed out.

Then there was silence, the special kind that you get after a really unpleasant noise.

And the Bursar said, “All right. I give in. We will try the Rite of AshkEnte.”

It is the most serious ritual eight wizards can undertake. It summons Death, who naturally knows everything that is going on everywhere.

And of course it’s done with reluctance, because senior wizards are generally very old and would prefer not to do anything to draw Death’s attention in their direction.

It took place in the midnight in the University’s Great Hall, in a welter of incense, candlesticks, runic inscriptions and magic circles, none of which was strictly necessary but which made the wizards feel better. Magic flared, the chants were chanted, the invocations were truly invoked.

The wizards stared into the magic octogram, which remained empty. After a while the circle of robed figures began to mutter amongst themselves.

“We must have done something wrong.”

“Oook.”

“Maybe He is out.”

“Or busy …”

“Do you think we could give up and go back to bed?”

WHO ARE WE WAITING FOR, EXACTLY?

The Bursar turned slowly to the figure beside him. You could always tell a wizard’s robe; it was bedecked with sequins, sigils, fur and lace, and there was usually a considerable amount of wizard inside it. This robe, however, was very black. The material looked as though it had been chosen for its hard-wearing qualities. So did its owner. He looked as though if he wrote a diet book, it would be a bestseller.

Death was watching the octogram with an expression of polite interest.

“Er,” said the Bursar. “The fact is, in fact, that, er, you should be on the inside.”

I’M SO SORRY.

Death stalked in a dignified way into the centre of the room and watched the Bursar expectantly.

I HOPE WE ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE ANY OF THIS “FOUL FIEND” BUSINESS AGAIN, he said.

“I trust we are not interrupting any important enterprise?” said the Bursar politely.

ALL MY WORK IS IMPORTANT, said Death.

“Naturally,” said the Bursar.

TO SOMEBODY.

“Er. Er. The reason, o fou— sir, that we have called you here, is for the reason—”

IT IS RINCEWIND.

“What?”

THE REASON YOU SUMMONED ME. THE ANSWER IS: IT IS RINCEWIND.

“But we haven’t asked you the question yet!”

NEVERTHELESS. THE ANSWER IS: IT IS RINCEWIND.

“Look, what we want to know is, what’s causing this outbreak of … oh.”

Death pointedly picked invisible particles off the edge of his scythe.

The Archchancellor cupped a gnarled hand over his ear.

“What’d he say? Who’s the fella with the stick?”

“It’s Death, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar patiently.

“Eh?”

“It’s Death, sir. You know.”

“Tell him we don’t want any,” said the old wizard, waving his stick.

The Bursar sighed. “We summoned him, Archchancellor.”

“Is it? What’d we go and do that for? Bloody silly thing to do.”

The Bursar gave Death an embarrassed grin. He was on the point of asking him to excuse the Archchancellor on account of his age, but realised that this would in the circumstances be a complete waste of breath.

“Are we talking about the wizard Rincewind? The one with the—” the Bursar gave a shudder— “horrible Luggage on legs? But he got blown up when there was all that business with the sourcerer, didn’t he?”[4]

INTO THE DUNGEON DIMENSIONS. AND NOW HE IS TRYING TO GET BACK HOME.

“Can he do that?”

THERE WOULD NEED TO BE AN UNUSUAL CONJUNCTION OF CIRCUMSTANCES. REALITY WOULD NEED TO BE WEAKENED IN CERTAIN UNEXPECTED WAYS.

“That isn’t likely to happen, is it?” said the Bursar anxiously. People who have it on record that they were visiting their aunt for two months are always nervous about people turning up who may have mistakenly thought that they weren’t, and owing to some trick of the light might have believed they had seen them doing things that they couldn’t have been doing owing to being at their aunt’s.

3

Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell tower. The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.

4

The Bursar was referring obliquely to the difficult occasion when the University very nearly caused the end of the world, and would in fact have done so had it not been for a chain of events involving Rincewind, a magic carpet and a half-brick in a sock. (See Sourcery). The whole affair was very embarrassing to wizards, as it always is to people who find out afterwards that they were on the wrong side all along^[*], and it was remarkable how many of the University’s senior staff were now adamant that at the time they had been off sick, visiting their aunt, or doing research with the door locked while humming loudly and had had no idea of what was going on outside. There had been some desultory talk about putting up a statue to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the Roll of Honour, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed.

* ie, the one that lost.