Eric Read Free

to peeling a banana. He had also been uniquely good at running away from things. He was not, the Librarian considered, the type to be easily caught.
    There had probably been an unusual conjunction of circumstances.
    That was a far more likely explanation.
     
    There had been an unusual conjunction of circumstances.
    By exactly a million to one chance there had been someone watching, studying, looking for the right tools for a special job.
    And here was Rincewind.
    It was almost too easy.
     
    So Rincewind opened his eyes. There was a ceiling above him; if it was the floor, then he was in trouble.
    So far, so good.
    He cautiously felt the surface he was lying on. It was grainy, woody in fact, with the odd nail-hole. A human sort of surface.
    His ears picked up the crackle of a fire and a bubbling noise, source unknown.
    His nose, feeling that it was being left out of things, hastened to report a whiff of brimstone.
    Right. So where did that leave him? Lying on a rough wooden floor in a firelit room with something that bubbled and gave off sulfurous smells. In his unreal, dreamy state he felt quite pleased at this process of deduction.
    What else?
    Oh, yes.
    He opened his mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.
    This made him feel slightly better.
    He lay there a bit longer. Through the tumbledheap of his memories came the recollections of mornings in bed when he was a little boy, desperately subdividing the passing time into smaller and smaller units to put off the terrible moment of getting up and having to face all the problems of life such as, in this case, who he was, where he was, and why he was.
    “ What are you?” said a voice on the edge of his consciousness.
    “I was coming to that,” muttered Rincewind.
    The room oscillated into focus as he pushed himself up on his elbows.
    “I warn you,” said the voice, which seemed to be coming from a table, “I am protected by many powerful amulets.”
    “Jolly good,” said Rincewind. “I wish I was.”
    Details began to distil out of the blur. It was a long, low room, one end of which was entirely occupied by an enormous fireplace. A bench all down one wall contained a selection of glassware apparently created by a drunken glassblower with hic-cups, and inside its byzantine coils colored liquids seethed and bubbled. A skeleton hung from a hook in a relaxed fashion. On a perch beside it someonehad nailed a stuffed bird. Whatever sins it had committed in life, it hadn’t deserved what the taxidermist had done to it.
    Rincewind’s gaze then swept across the floor. It was obvious that it was the only sweeping the floor had had for some time. Only around him had space been cleared among the debris of broken glass and overturned retorts for—
    A magic circle.
    It looked an extremely thorough job. Whoever had chalked it was clearly very aware that its purpose was to divide the universe into two bits, the inside and the outside.
    Rincewind was, of course, inside.
    “Ah,” he said, feeling a familiar and almost comforting sense of helpless dread sweep over him.
    “I adjure and conjure thee against all aggressive acts, o demon of the pit,” said the voice from, Rincewind now realized, behind the table.
    “Fine, fine,” said Rincewind quickly. “That’s all right by me. Er. It isn’t possible that there has been the teeniest little mistake here, could there?”
    “Avaunt!”
    “Right!” said Rincewind. He looked around him desperately. “How?”
    “Don’t you think you can lure me to my doom with thy lying tongue, o fiend of Shamharoth,” said the table. “I am learned in the ways of demons. Obey my every command or I will return thee unto the boiling hell from which you came. Thou came, sorry. Thou came’st, in fact. And I really mean it.”
    The figure stepped out. It was quite short, and most of it was hidden by a variety of charms, amulets and talismans which, even if not effective against magic, would probably have protected it against a tolerably