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It’s a terrible thing to be nearly sixteen and the wrong species.
That was the trouble with wizards, they had to make everything look difficult. All you really needed was willpower.
“Corporal Nobbs,” he rasped, “why are you kicking people when they’re down?” “Safest way, sir,” said Nobby.
In the hours until dawn he’d had all sorts of opinions, starting with a conviction that it had been a big mistake to be born.
You tell them a lie, and then when you don’t need it anymore you tell them another lie and tell them they’re progressing along the road to wisdom. Then instead of laughing they follow you even more, hoping that at the heart of all the lies they’ll find the truth. And bit by bit they accept the unacceptable. Amazing.
Once you’ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course.
People were stupid, sometimes. They thought the Library was a dangerous place because of all the magical books, which was true enough, but what made it really one of the most dangerous places there could ever be was the simple fact that it was a library.
There are times when it is a veritable pleasure to drop the bomb right away.
“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.
I arrested a dragon but it got away.
Perhaps the magic would last. Perhaps it wouldn’t. But then, what does?
