The Colour of Magic (21 page)

The sun rose in the sky, looking noticeably bigger this close to the Edge. They stood with their backs against the mast, busy with their own thoughts. Every so often one or other would pick up a bucket and do a bit of desultory bailing, for no very intelligent reason.

The sea around them seemed to be getting crowded. Rincewind noticed several tree trunks keeping station with them, and just below the surface the water was alive with fish of all sorts. Of course – the current must be teeming with food washed from the continents near the Hub. He wondered what kind of life it would be, having to keep swimming all the time to stay exactly in the same place. Pretty similar to his own, he decided. He spotted a small green frog which was paddling desperately in the grip of the inexorable current. To Twoflower's amazement he found a paddle and carefully extended it towards the little amphibian, which scrambled onto it gratefully. A moment later a pair of jaws broke the water and snapped impotently at the spot where it had been swimming.

The frog looked up at Rincewind from the cradle of his hands, and then bit him thoughtfully on the thumb. Twoflower giggled. Rincewind tucked the frog away in a pocket, and pretended he hadn't heard.

'All very humanitarian, but why?' said Twoflower. 'It'll all be the same in an hour.'

'Because,' said Rincewind vaguely, and did a bit of bailing. Spray was being thrown up now and the current was so strong that waves were forming and breaking all around them. It all seemed unnaturally warm. There was a hot golden haze on the sea.

The roaring was louder now. A squid bigger than anything Rincewind had seen before broke the surface a few hundred yards away and thrashed madly with its tentacles before sinking away. Something else that was large and fortunately unidentifiable howled in the mist. A whole squadron of flying fish tumbled up in a cloud of rainbow-edged droplets and managed to gain a few yards before dropping back and being swept in an eddy.

They were running out of world. Rincewind dropped his bucket and snatched at the mast as the roaring, final end of everything raced towards them.

'I must see this—' said Twoflower, half falling and half diving towards the prow.

Something hard and unyielding smacked into the hull, which spun ninety degrees and came side-on to the invisible obstacle. Then it stopped suddenly and a wash of cold sea foam cascaded over the deck, so that for a few seconds Rincewind was under several feet of boiling green water. He began to scream and then the underwater world became the deep clanging purple colour of fading consciousness, because it was at about this point that Rincewind started to drown.

He awoke with his mouth full of burning liquid and, when he swallowed, the searing pain in his throat jerked him into full consciousness.

The boards of a boat pressed into his back and Twoflower was looking down at him with an expression of deep concern. Rincewind groaned, and sat up.

This turned out to be a mistake. The edge of the world was a few feet away.

Beyond it, at a level just below that of the lip of the endless Rimfall, was something altogether
magical.

Some seventy miles away, and well beyond the tug of the rim current, a dhow with the red sails typical of a freelance slaver drifted aimlessly through the velvety twilight. The crew – such as remained – were clustered on the foredeck, surrounding the men working feverishly on the raft.

The captain, a thickset man who wore the elbow-turbans typical of a Great Nef tribesman, was much travelled and had seen many strange peoples and curious things, many of which he had subsequently enslaved or stolen. He had begun his career as a sailor on the Dehydrated Ocean in the heart of the disc's driest desert. (Water on the disc has an uncommon fourth state, caused by intense heat combined with the strange desiccating effects of octarine light: it dehydrates, leaving a silvery residue like free-flowing sand through which a well-designed hull can glide with ease. The Dehydrated Ocean is a strange place, but not so strange as its fish.) The captain had never before been really frightened. Now he was terrified.

'I can't hear anything,' he muttered to the first mate.

The mate peered into the gloom.

'Perhaps it fell overboard?' he suggested hopefully. As if in answer there came a furious pounding from the oar deck below their feet, and the sound of splintering wood. The crewmen drew together fearfully, brandishing axes and torches.

They probably wouldn't dare to use them, even if the Monster came rushing towards them. Before its terrible nature had been truly understood several men had attacked it with axes, whereupon it had turned aside from its single-minded searching of the ship and had either chased them overboard or had –
eaten
them? The captain was not quite certain. The Thing looked like an ordinary wooden sea chest. A bit larger than usual, maybe, but not suspiciously so. But while it sometimes seemed to contain things like old socks and miscellaneous luggage, at other times – and he shuddered – it seemed to be, seemed to
have
. . . He tried not to think about it. It was just that the men who had been drowned overboard had probably been more fortunate than those it had caught. He tried not to think about it. There had been
teeth
, teeth like white wooden gravestones, and a tongue red as mahogany . . .

He tried not to think about it. It didn't work.

But he thought bitterly about one thing. This was going to be the last time he rescued ungrateful drowning men in mysterious circumstances. Slavery was better than sharks, wasn't it? And then they had escaped and when his sailors had investigated their big chest – how had they appeared in the middle of an untroubled ocean sitting on a big chest, anyway? – it had bitt . . . He tried not to think about it again, but he found himself wondering what would happen when the damned thing realized that its owner wasn't on board any longer . . .

'Raft's ready, lord,' said the first mate.

'Into the water with it,' shouted the captain, and 'Get aboard!' and 'Fire the ship!'

After all, another ship wouldn't be too hard to come by, he philosophized, but a man might have to wait a long time in that Paradise the mullahs advertised before he was granted another life. Let the magical box eat lobsters.

Some pirates achieved immortality by great deeds of cruelty or derring-do. Some achieved immortality by amassing great wealth. But the captain had long ago decided that he would, on the whole, prefer to achieve immortality by not dying.

* * *

'What the hell is that?' demanded Rincewind.

'It's beautiful,' said Twoflower beatifically.

'I'll decide about that when I know what it is,' said the wizard.

'It is the Rimbow,' said a voice immediately behind his left ear, 'and you are fortunate indeed to be looking at it. From above, at any rate.'

The voice was accompanied by a gust of cold, fishy breath. Rincewind sat quite still.

'Twoflower?' he said.

'Yes?'

'If I turn around, what will I see?'

'His name is Tethis. He says he's a sea troll. This is his boat. He rescued us,' explained Twoflower. 'Will you look around now?'

'Not just at the moment, thank you. So why aren't we going over the Edge, then?' asked Rincewind with glassy calmness.

'Because your boat hit the Circumfence,' said the voice behind him (in tones that made Rincewind imagine submarine chasms and lurking Things in coral reefs).

'The Circumfence?' he repeated.

'Yes. It runs along the edge of the world,' said the unseen troll. Above the roar of the waterfall Rincewind thought he could make out the splash of oars. He
hoped
they were oars.

'Ah. You mean the
circumference
,' said Rincewind. 'The circumference makes the edge of things.'

'So does the Circumfence,' said the troll.

'He means this,' said Twoflower, pointing down. Rincewind's eyes followed the finger, dreading what they might see . . .

Hubwards of the boat was a rope suspended a few feet above the surface of the white water. The boat was attached to it, moored yet mobile, by a complicated arrangement of pulleys and little wooden wheels. They ran along the rope as the unseen rower propelled the craft along the very lip of the Rimfall. That explained one mystery – but what supported the rope?

Rincewind peered along its length and saw a stout wooden post sticking up out of the water a few yards ahead. As he watched the boat neared it and then passed it, the little wheels clacking neatly around it in a groove obviously cut for the purpose.

Rincewind also noticed that smaller ropes hung down from the main rope at intervals of a yard or so.

He turned back to Twoflower.

'I can see what it
is'
he said, 'but
what
is it?'

Twoflower shrugged. Behind Rincewind the sea troll said, 'Up ahead is my house. We will talk more when we are there. Now I must row.'

Rincewind found that looking ahead meant that he would have to turn and find out what a sea troll actually looked like, and he wasn't sure he wanted to do that yet. He looked at the Rimbow instead.

It hung in the mists a few lengths beyond the edge of the world, appearing only at morning and evening when the light of the disc's little orbiting sun shone past the massive bulk of Great A'Tuin the World Turtle and struck the disc's magical field at exactly the right angle.

A double rainbow coruscated into being. Close into the lip of the Rimfall were the seven lesser colours, sparkling and dancing in the spray of the dying seas.

But they were pale in comparison to the wider band that floated beyond them, not deigning to share the same spectrum.

It was the King Colour, of which all the lesser colours are merely partial and wishy-washy reflections. It was octarine, the colour of magic. It was alive and glowing and vibrant and it was the undisputed pigment of the imagination, because wherever it appeared it was a sign that mere matter was a servant of the powers of the magical mind. It was enchantment itself.

But Rincewind always thought it looked a sort of greenish-purple.

After a while a small speck on the rim of the world resolved itself into a eyot or crag, so perilously perched that the waters of the fall swirled around it at the start of their long drop. A driftwood shanty had been built on it, and Rincewind saw that the top rope of the Circumfence climbed over the rocky island on a number of iron stakes and actually passed through the shack by a small round window. He learned later that this was so that the troll could be alerted to the arrival of any salvage on his stretch of the Circumfence by means of a series of small bronze bells, balanced delicately on the rope.

A crude floating stockade had been built out of rough timber on the hubward side of the island. It contained one or two hulks and quite a large amount of floating wood in the form of planks, baulks and even whole natural tree trunks, some still sporting green leaves. This close to the Edge the disc's magical field was so intense that a hazy corona flickered across everything as raw illusion spontaneously discharged itself.

With a last few squeaky jerks the boat slid up against a small driftwood jetty. As it grounded itself and formed a circuit Rincewind felt all the familiar sensations of a huge occult aura – oily, bluish-tasting, and smelling of tin. All around them pure, unfocused magic was sleeting soundlessly into the world.

The wizard and Twoflower scrambled onto the planking and for the first time Rincewind saw the troll.

It wasn't half so dreadful as he had imagined.

Umm, said his imagination after a while.

It wasn't that the troll was
horrifying.
Instead of the rotting, betentacled monstrosity he had been expecting Rincewind found himself looking at a rather squat but not particularly ugly old man who would quite easily have passed for normal on any city street, always provided that other people on the street were
used
to seeing old men who were apparently composed of water and very little else. It was as if the ocean had decided to create life without going through all that tedious business of evolution, and had simply formed a part of itself into a biped and sent it walking squishily up the beach. The troll was a pleasant translucent blue colour. As Rincewind stared a small shoal of silver fish flashed across its chest.

'It's rude to stare,' said the troll. Its mouth opened with a little crest of foam, and shut again in exactly the same way that water closes over a stone.

'Is it? Why?' said Rincewind. How does he hold himself together, his mind screamed at him. Why doesn't he spill?

'If you will follow me to my house I will find you food and a change of clothing,' said the troll solemnly. He set off over the rocks without turning to see if they would follow him. After all, where else could they go? It was getting dark, and a chilly damp breeze was blowing over the edge of the world. Already the transient Rimbow had faded and the mists above the waterfall were beginning to thin.

'Come on,' said Rincewind, grabbing Twoflower's elbow. But the tourist didn't appear to want to move.

'Come on,' the wizard repeated.

'When it gets really dark, do you think we'll be able to look down and see Great A'Tuin the World Turtle?' asked Twoflower, staring at the rolling clouds.

'I hope not,' said Rincewind, 'I really do. Now let's go, shall we?'

Twoflower followed him reluctantly into the shack. The troll had lit a couple of lamps and was sitting comfortably in a rocking chair. He got to his feet as they entered and poured two cups of a green liquid from a tall pitcher. In the dim light he appeared to phosphoresce, in the manner of warm seas on velvety summer nights. Just to add a baroque gloss to Rincewind's dull terror he seemed to be several inches taller, too.

Most of the furniture in the room appeared to be boxes.

'Uh. Really great place you've got here,' said Rincewind. 'Ethnic.'

He reached for a cup and looked at the green pool shimmering inside it. It'd better be drinkable, he thought. Because I'm going to drink it. He swallowed.

It was the same stuff Twoflower had given him in the rowing boat but, at the time, his mind had ignored it because there were more pressing matters. Now it had the leisure to savour the taste.