Interesting Times (34 page)

The air felt greasy. Sparks crawled over the floor and crackled on each angle.

Rincewind stood up. His beard streamed out as a mass of individual hairs.

The lightning globes shone down on a round lake of, to judge from the ripples, pure quicksilver. In the center was a low, five-sided island. As Rincewind stared, a boat came drifting gently around to his side of the pool, making little
slupslup
noises as it moved through the mercury.

It was not a lot larger than a rowing boat and, lying on its tiny deck, was a figure in armor. Or possibly just the armor. If it
was
just empty armor, then it was lying in the arms-folded position of a suit of armor that has passed away.

Rincewind sidled around the silver lake until he reached a slab of what looked very much like gold, set in the floor in front of a statue.

He knew you got inscriptions in tombs, although he was never sure who it was who was supposed to read them. The gods, possibly, although surely they knew everything already? He’d never considered that they’d cluster round and say things like, “Gosh, ‘Dearly Beloved’ was he? I never knew that.”

This one simply said, in pictograms: One Sun Mirror.

There wasn’t anything about mighty conquests. There was no list of his tremendous achievements. There was nothing down there about wisdom or being the father of his people. There was no
explanation
. Whoever knows this name, it seemed to say, knows everything. And there was no admitting the possibility that anyone getting this far would not have heard the name of One Sun Mirror.

The statue looked like porcelain. It had been painted quite realistically. One Sun Mirror seemed an ordinary sort of man. You would not have pointed him out in a crowd as Emperor material. But this man, with his little round hat and little round shield and little round men on little round ponies, had glued together a thousand warring factions into one great Empire, often using their own blood to do it.

Rincewind looked closer. Of course, it was just an impression, but around the set of the mouth and the look of the eyes there was an expression he’d last seen on the face of Ghenghiz Cohen.

It was the expression of someone who was absolutely and totally unafraid of anything.

The little boat headed towards the far side of the lake.

One of the globes flickered a little and then faded to red. It winked out. Another followed it.

He had to get out.

There was something else, though. At the foot of the statue, lying as if they’d just been dropped there, were a helmet, a pair of gauntlets, and two heavy-looking boots.

Rincewind picked up the helmet. It didn’t look very strong, but it did look quite light. Normally he didn’t bother with protective clothing, reasoning that the best defense against threatening danger was to be on another continent, but right now the idea of armor had its attractions.

He removed his hat, put the helmet on, pulled down the visor, and then wedged the hat on top of the helmet.

There was a flicker in front of his eyes and Rincewind was staring at the back of his own head. It was a grainy picture, and it was in shades of green rather than proper colors, but it was definitely the back of his own head he was looking at. People had told him what it looked like.

He raised the visor and blinked.

The pool was still in front of him.

He lowered the visor.

There he was, about fifty feet away, with this helmet on his head.

He waved a hand up and down.

The figure in the visor waved a hand up and down.

He turned around and faced himself. Yep. That was him.

Okay, he thought. A magic helmet. It lets you see yourself a long way away. Great. You can have fun watching yourself fall into holes you can’t see because they’re right up close.

He turned around again, raised the visor and inspected the gloves. They seemed as light as the helmet but quite clumsy. You could hold a sword, but not much else.

He tried one on. Immediately, with a faint sizzling noise, a row of little pictures lit up on the wide cuff. They showed soldiers. Soldiers digging, soldiers fighting, soldiers climbing…

Ah. So…
magic
armor. Perfectly normal magic armor. It had never been very popular in Ankh-Morpork. Of course, it was light. You could make it as thin as cloth. But it tended to lose its magic without warning. Many an ancient lord’s last words had been, “You can’t kill me because I’ve got magic aaargh.”

Rincewind looked at the boots, with suspicious recollection of the trouble there had been with the University’s prototype Seven League Boots. Footwear which tried to make you take steps twenty-one miles long imposed unfortunate groinal strains; they’d got the things off the student just in time, but he’d still had to wear a special device for several months, and ate standing up.

All right, but even
old
magic armor would be useful now. It wasn’t as if it weighed much, and the mud of Hunghung hadn’t improved what was left of his own boots. He put his feet into them.

He thought: Well, so what is supposed to happen now?

He straightened up.

And behind him, with the sound of seven thousand flower pots smashing together, the lightning still crackling over them, the Red Army came to attention.

Hex had grown a bit during the night. Adrian Turnipseed, who had been on duty to feed the mice and rewind the clockwork and clean out the dead ants, had sworn that he’d done nothing else and that no one had come in.

But now, where there had been the big clumsy arrangement of blocks so that the results could be read, was a quill pen in the middle of a network of pulleys and levers.

“Watch,” said Adrian, nervously tapping out a very simple problem. “It’s come up with this after doing all those spells at suppertime…”

The ants scuttled. The clockwork spun. The springs and levers jerked so sharply that Ponder took a step back.

The quill pen wobbled over to an inkwell, dipped, returned to the sheet of paper Adrian had put under the levers, and began to write.

“It blots a bit,” he said, in a helpless tone of voice. “What’s
happening?
”

Ponder had been thinking further about this. The latest conclusions hadn’t been comforting.

“Well…we know that books containing magic become a little bit…sapient…” he began. “And we’ve made a
machine
for…”

“You mean it’s
alive?
”

“Come on, let’s not get all occult about this,” said Ponder, trying to sound jovial. “We’re wizards, after all.”

“Listen, you know that long problem in thaumic fields you wanted me to put in?”

“Yes. Well?”

“It gave me the answer at midnight,” said Adrian, his face pale.

“Good.”

“Yes, good, except that I didn’t actually
give
it the problem until half past one, Ponder.”

“You’re telling me you got the answer before you asked the question?”

“Yes!”

“Why
did
you ask the question, then?”

“I thought about it, and I thought maybe I had to. I mean, it couldn’t have known what the answer was going to be if I didn’t give it the problem, yes?”

“Good point. Er. You waited ninety minutes, though.”

Adrian looked at his pointy boots.

“I…was hiding in the privy. Well, Redo from Start could—”

“All right, all right. Go and have something to eat.”

“Are we meddling with things we don’t understand, Ponder?”

Ponder looked up at the gnomic bulk of the machine. It didn’t seem threatening, merely…
other
.

He thought: meddle first, understand later. You had to meddle a
bit
before you had anything to try to understand. And the thing was never, ever, to go back and hide in the Lavatory of Unreason. You have to try to get your mind around the Universe before you can give it a twist.

Perhaps we shouldn’t have given you a name. We didn’t think about that. It was a joke. But we should have remembered that names are important. A thing with a name is a bit more than a thing.

“Off you go, Adrian,” he said firmly.

He sat down and carefully typed:

Hello.

Things whirred.

The quill wrote:

+++ ?????? +++ Hello +++ Redo From Start +++

Far above, a butterfly—its wings an undistinguished yellow, with black markings—fluttered through an open window.

Ponder began the calculations for the transfer between Hunghung and Ankh-Morpork.

The butterfly alighted for a moment on the maze of glass pipes. When it rose again, it left behind a very small blob of nectar.

Ponder typed carefully, far below.

A small but significant ant, one of the scurrying thousands, emerged from a break in the tube and spent a few seconds sucking at the sweet liquid before going back to work.

After a while, Hex gave an answer. Apart from one small but significant point, it was entirely correct.

Rincewind turned around.

With an echoing chorus of creaks and groans, the Red Army turned around, too.

And it
was
red. It was the same color, Rincewind realized, as the soil.

He’d bumped into a few statues in the darkness. He hadn’t realized that there were
this
many. They stretched, rank on rank, into the distant shadows.

Experimentally, he turned around. Behind him, there was another chorus of stampings.

After a few false starts he found that the only way to end up facing them was to take off the boots, turn, and put the boots on again.

He lowered the visor for a moment, and saw himself lowering the visor for a moment.

He stuck up an arm. They stuck out their arms. He jumped up and down. They jumped up and down, with a crash that made the globes swing. Lightning sizzled from their boots.

He felt a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

He touched his nose. They touched their noses. He made, with terrible glee, the traditional gesture for the dismissal of demons. Seven thousand terracotta middle fingers stabbed towards the ceiling.

He tried to calm down.

The word his mind had been groping for finally surfaced, and it was
golem
.

There were one or two of them, even in Ankh-Morpork. You were bound to get them in any area where you had wizards or priests of an experimental turn of mind. They were usually just figures made out of clay and animated with some suitable spell or prayer. They pottered about doing simple odd jobs, but they were not very fashionable these days. The problem was not putting them to work but stopping them from working; if you set a golem to digging the garden and then forgot about it, you’d come back to find it’d planted a row of beans 1500 miles long.

Rincewind looked down at one of the gloves.

He cautiously touched the little picture of a fighting soldier.

The sound of seven thousand swords being simultaneously unsheathed was like the tearing of a thick sheet of steel. Seven thousand points were pointed right at Rincewind.

He took a step back. So did the army.

He was in a place with thousands of artificial soldiers wearing swords. The fact that he appeared to have control of them was no great comfort. He’d theoretically had control of Rincewind for the whole of his life, and look what had happened to him.

He looked at the little pictures again. One of them showed a soldier with two heads. When he touched it, the army turned about smartly. Ah.

Now to get out of here…

The Horde watched the bustle among Lord Hong’s men. Objects were being dragged to the front line.

“They don’t look like archers to me,” said Boy Willie.

“Those things are Barking Dogs,” said Cohen. “I should know. Seen ’em before. They’re like a barrel full of fireworks, and when the fireworks are lit a big stone comes rushing out of the other end.”

“Why?”

“Well, would you hang around if someone had just lit a firework by your arse?”

“Here, Teach, he said ‘arse’,” complained Truckle. “Look, on my bit of paper here it says you mustn’t say—”

“We’ve got shields, haven’t we?” said Mr. Saveloy. “I’m sure if we keep close together and put the shields over our heads we’ll be as right as rain.”

“The stone’s about a foot across and going very fast and it’s red hot.”

“Not shields, then?”

“No,” said Cohen. “Truckle, you push Hamish—”

“We won’t get fifty yards, Ghenghiz,” said Caleb.

“Better fifty yards now than six feet in a minute, yes?” said Cohen.

“Bravo!” said Mr. Saveloy.

“Whut?”

Lord Hong watched them. He saw the Horde hang their shields around the wheelchair to form a crude traveling wall, and saw the wheels begin to turn.

He raised his sword.

“Fire!”

“Still tamping the charges, o lord!”

“I said
fire!
”

“Got to prime the Dogs, o lord!”

The bombardiers worked feverishly, spurred on less by terror of Lord Hong than by the onrushing Horde.

Mr. Saveloy’s hair streamed in the wind. He bounded through the dust, waving his sword and screaming.

He’d never been so happy in all his life.

So this was the secret at the heart of it all: to look death right in the face and charge…It made everything so utterly simple.

Lord Hong threw down his helmet. “Fire, you wretched peasants! You scum of the earth! Why must I ask twice! Give me that torch!”

He pushed a bombardier aside, crouched down beside a Dog, heaved on it so that the barrel was pointing at the oncoming Cohen, lifted the torch—

The earth heaved. The Dog reared and rolled sideways.

A round red head, smiling faintly, rose out of the ground.

There were screams in the ranks as the soldiers looked down at the moving dirt under their boots, tried to run on a surface that was just shifting soil, and disappeared in the rising cloud of dust.

The ground caved in.

Then it caved out again as stricken soldiers climbed up one another to escape because, rising gently through the turmoil, was the soil in human shape.