Discworld 03 - Equal Rites

Be a fool if you must, but you might at least be your own fool.

Granny adjusted her hat and straightened up purposefully.
“Right,” she said. Cutangle swayed. The tone of voice cut through him like a diamond saw. He could dimly remember being scolded by his mother when he was small; well, this was that voice, only refined and concentrated and edged with little bits of carborundum, a tone of command that would have a corpse standing to attention and could probably have marched it halfway across its cemetery before it remembered it was dead.

There are storms that are frankly theatrical, all sheet lightning and metallic thunder rolls. There are storms that are tropical and sultry, and incline to hot winds and fireballs. But this was a storm of the Circle Sea plains, and its main ambition was to hit the ground with as much rain as possible. It was the kind of storm that suggests that the whole sky has swallowed a diuretic. The thunder and lightning hung around in the background, supplying a sort of chorus, but the rain was the star of the show. It tap-danced across the land.

The staff wasn’t locked in ice, but lay peacefully in a seething pool of water.
One of the unusual aspects of a magical universe is the existence of opposites. It has already been remarked that darkness isn’t the opposite of light, it is simply the absence of light. In the same way absolute zero is merely the absence of heat. If you want to know what real cold is, the cold so intense that water can’t even freeze but anti-boils, look no further than this pool.

Treatle nodded. “I hadn’t looked at it like that,” he said, “but you’re absolutely right. He’s really pushed back the boundaries of ignorance. There’s so much about the universe we don’t know.”
They both savored the strange warm glow of being much more ignorant than ordinary people, who were ignorant of only ordinary things.

“Ook?” said the Head Librarian, and backed away from Esk. But she had heard about him and had come prepared. She offered him a banana.
The orangutan reached out slowly and then snatched it with a grin of triumph.
There may be universes where librarianship is considered a peaceful sort of occupation, and where the risks are limited to large volumes falling off the shelves on to one’s head, but the keeper of a magic library is no job for the unwary. Spells have power, and merely writing them down and shoving them between covers doesn’t do anything to reduce it. The stuff leaks. Books tend to react with one another, creating randomized magic with a mind of its own. Books of magic are usually chained to their shelves, but not to prevent them being stolen…
One such accident had turned the librarian into an ape, since when he had resisted all attempts to turn him back, explaining in sign language that life as an orangutan was considerably better than life as a human being, because all the big philosophical questions resolved themselves into wondering where the next banana was coming from. Anyway, long arms and prehensile feet were ideal for dealing with high shelves.

“Who’s it for?”
“Mrs. Herapath, the glassblower’s wife.”
Esk blew her nose. “He’s the one who doesn’t blow much glass, isn’t he?”
Granny looked at her over the top of the desk.
“How do you mean?”
“When she was talking to you yesterday she called him Old Mister Once A Fortnight.”
“Mmph,” said Granny. She carefully finished the sentence: “Dylewt in won pint warter and won droppe in hys tee and be shure to wear loose clowthing allso that no vysitors exspected.”

“You know the house down the street, where that fat lady lives with all those young ladies you said were her relatives?”
“Mrs. Palm,” said Granny cautiously. “Very respectable lady.”
“People come to visit them all night long. I watched. I’m surprised they get any sleep.”
“Um,” said Granny.
“It must be a trial for the poor woman with all those daughters to feed, too. I think people could be more considerate.”

They had been in Ankh-Morpork for three days and Granny was beginning to enjoy herself, much to her surprise. She had found them lodgings in The Shades, an ancient part of the city whose inhabitants were largely nocturnal and never inquired about one another’s business because curiosity not only killed the cat but threw it in the river with weights tied to its feet.

He explained about the caravans. The child nodded.
“People all get together to travel?”
“Precisely.”
“Where to?”
“All sorts of places. Sto Lat, Pseudopolis…Ankh-Morpork, of course…”
“But the river goes there,” said Esk, reasonably. “Barges. The Zoons.”
“Ah, yes,” said the merchant, “but they charge high prices and they can’t carry everything and, anyway, no one trusts them much.”
“But they’re very honest!”
“Huh, yes,” he said. “But you know what they say: never trust an honest man.” He smiled knowingly.