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to the way it works. Though some of its inhabitants are witches, dwarfs, wizards and even policemen, their stories are fundamentally about people
He does not like things out of place. The Empire was not built by allowing things to get out of place. That is his view.” “I begin to see—” said the Patrician. “Quite so.” Gorphal smiled into his beard. “This tourist is a thing that is out of place.
the ganefs, thieves, finewirers, whores, illusionists, backsliders and second-story men awoke and breakfasted. Wizards went about their polydimensional affairs.
“no spells are much good. It takes three months to commit even a simple one to memory, and then once you’ve used it, poof! it’s gone. That’s what’s so stupid about the whole magic thing, you know. You spend twenty years learning the spell that makes nude virgins appear in your bedroom, and then you’re so poisoned by quicksilver fumes and half blind from reading old grimoires that you can’t remember what happens next.”
“I believe I have a couple of guards outside—” “Had.” “And some others in the doorway across the street—” “Formerly.” “And two bowmen on the roof.” A flicker of doubt passed across Zlorf’s face, like the last shaft of sunlight over a badly plowed field.
“How long has this—Guild—been in existence, may I ask?” he said. “Since this afternoon,” said Rerpf. “I’m vice-guildmaster in charge of tourism, you know.” “What is this tourism of which you speak?” “Uh—we are not quite sure . . .”
It has been remarked before that those who are sensitive to radiations in the far octarine—the eighth color, the pigment of the Imagination—can see things that others cannot.
Then Death remembered what was due to happen later that night. It would not be true to say that Death smiled, because in any case His features were perforce frozen in a calcareous grin.
pausing only to extract the life from a passing mayfly, and one ninth of the lives from a cat cowering under the fish stall (all cats can see into the octarine)—Death
Down in the cellar Broadman looked up, muttered to himself, and carried on with his work. His entire spindlewinter’s supply of candles had already been strewn on the floor, mixed with his store of kindling wood. Now he was attacking a barrel of lamp oil. “Inn-sewer-ants,” he muttered. Oil gushed out and swirled around his feet.
“You inn-sewered the Drum?” he said. “You bet Broadman it wouldn’t catch fire?”
“Well, my point is, you see, that gold also has its sort of magical field. Sort of financial wizardry. Echo-gnomics.”
He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used.
some of the ancient magic could still be found in its raw state, recognizable—to the initiated—by the eightfold shape it made in the crystalline structure of space-time. There was the metal octiron, for example, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous amounts of raw enchantment.
It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a habit of going around to atheists’ houses and smashing their windows.
Perhaps there was a . . . he racked his brains trying to remember what sort of accommodation forests traditionally offered . . . perhaps there was a gingerbread house or something?
Rincewind knew what was inside trees: wood, sap, possibly squirrels. Not a palace.
But why were there dryads at all? As far as he could recall, the tree people had died out centuries before. They had been out-evolved by humans, like most of the other Twilight Peoples. Only elves and trolls had survived the coming of Man to the Discworld;
That was how there came to be at Unseen University the Octavo, greatest of all grimoires, formerly owned by the Creator of the Universe. It was this book that Rincewind had once opened for a bet. He had only a second to stare at a page before setting off various alarm spells, but that was time enough for one spell to leap from it and settle in his memory like a toad in a stone.
The precise origins of the Mage Wars have been lost in the fogs of Time, but Disc philosophers agree that the First Men, shortly after their creation, understandably lost their temper.
he would have been even more worried had he known that the nightmare was not, as he thought, just the usual Discworld vertigo. It was a backward memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline).
hodor
“You’re a defeatist.” “Defeatist! That’s because I’m going to be defeated!”
She still comes to see her old dad, my little girl. She was the only one with the strength of character to murder me.
Let’s see, they’d suddenly appeared in this dragon after, they’d materialized in this drag, they’d sudd, they’d, they’d—they had struck up a conversation in the airport so naturally they had chosen to sit together on the plane, and he’d promised to show Jack Zweiblumen around when they got back to the States. Yes, that was it. And then Jack had been taken ill and he’d panicked and come through here and surprised this hijacker. Of course. What on earth was “Hublandish?” Dr. Rjinswand rubbed his forehead. What he could do with was a drink.
“What happens after a ship goes over the Rimfall?” said Twoflower. “Who knows?” “Well, in that case perhaps we’ll just sail on through space and land on another world.”
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.
“Ah. You mean the circumference,” said Rincewind. “The circumference makes the edge of things.” “So does the Circumfence,” said the troll.
“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?”
Most of the furniture in the room appeared to be boxes. “Uh. Really great place you’ve got here,” said Rincewind. “Ethnic.”
“But what do you want to sacrifice us for?” asked Twoflower. “You hardly know us!” “That’s rather the point, isn’t it?
There were no temples at all to the Lady, although she was arguably the most powerful goddess in the entire history of Creation. A few of the more daring members of the Gamblers’ Guild had once experimented with a form of worship, in the deepest cellars of Guild headquarters, and had all died of penury, murder or just Death within the week. She was the Goddess Who Must Not Be Named; those who sought Her never found Her, yet She was known to come to the aid of those in greatest need.
luck
“You know, as soon as I saw the suits I just knew I’d end up wearing one. Don’t ask me how I knew—I suppose it was because it was just about the worst possible thing that was likely to happen.”
“What am I going to die of?” said Rincewind. The tall figure hesitated. PARDON? it said. “Well, I haven’t broken anything, and I haven’t drowned, so what am I about to die of? You can’t just be killed by Death; there has to be a reason,”
