Sourcery (Discworld, #5; Rincewind, #3)

by Terry Pratchett

“Ah,” said Coin, “the robes and trimmings. Of course.”

“I would say,” he said carefully, “that he is unfair and unjust, but scrupulously evenhanded. He is unfair and unjust to everyone, without fear or favor.”

Just by looking at him you could tell he was the sort of man you’d expect to keep a white cat, and caress it idly while sentencing people to death in a piranha tank; and you’d hazard for good measure that he probably collected rare thin porcelain, turning it over and over in his blue-white fingers while distant screams echoed from the depths of the dungeons. You wouldn’t put it past him to use the word “exquisite” and have thin lips. He looked the kind of person who, when they blink, you mark it off on the calendar.

The people of Ankh are of a practical persuasion, and felt that the Patrician’s edict forbidding all street theater and mime artists made up for a lot of things. He didn’t administer a reign of terror, just the occasional light shower.

Like Death, which some of the city’s less fortunate citizens considered he intimately resembled, the Patrician never got angry until he had time to think about it. But sometimes he thought very quickly.

Wuffles growled. It was a deep, primeval noise, which struck a chord in the racial memory of all those present and filled them with an urgent desire to climb a tree. It suggested long gray shapes hunting in the dawn of time. It was astonishing that such a small animal could contain so much menace, and all of it was aimed at the staff in Coin’s hand.

“It’s just that no two seers have ever agreed about it. There have been all kinds of vague predictions. Quite mad, some of them. So it was called the Apocralypse.” He looked embarrassed. “It’s a sort of apocryphal Apocalypse. A kind of pun, you see.”

while it was bad enough to be attacked with deadly and ferocious accuracy by a rather pretty girl in a white dress with flowers on it, it was even worse for the male ego to be tripped up and bitten by a travel accessory; it was pretty bad for all the rest of the male, too.

It wasn’t blood in general he couldn’t stand the sight of, it was just his blood in particular that was so upsetting.

it wasn’t true silence at all, but a great roar of anti-noise. Silence isn’t the opposite of sound, it is merely its absence.

Wizards normally spoke imperiously, that was to be expected. But there was an edge to the voice that no one had heard before. It had knuckles in it.

No one knows why smoking boots always remain, no matter how big the explosion. It seems to be just one of those things.

He looked past the shiny pastry to the face of the wizard, and in the manic gleam of those eyes he saw the world turning upside down.

Some people, having a nightmare like that, would dismiss it as castration anxiety, but Rincewind’s subconscious knew being-cut-to-tiny-bits-mortal-dread when it saw it. It saw it most of the time.

He felt oddly surprised. He was making a decision. It was his. It belonged to him. No-one was forcing him to make it.

It was the ending of the first day of the sourcery, and the wizards had managed to change everything except themselves.

sourcery didn’t seem to work on things that were instrinsically magical.

had he wanted to change, he thought, or had he only wanted things rearranged more suitably?

Things are defined by what they do. And people, of course.

He didn’t like this staff. It was black, but not because that was its color, more because it seemed to be a moveable hole into some other, more unpleasant set of dimensions.

be seen,” said Carding. “But if we change the world, then human nature also will change.

“Tomorrow the world, and—” he calculated quickly—“on Friday the universe!”

“the University is finished. It was never the true home of magic, only its prison.

In his heart of hearts an inner Spelter had woken, and was struggling to make himself heard. It was a Spelter who suddenly longed for those quiet days, only hours ago, when magic was gentle and shuffled around the place in old slippers and always had time for a sherry and wasn’t like a hot sword in the brain and, above all, didn’t kill people.

the boutique of mysterious pleasures from whose flare-lit and curtain-hung stalls the late-night reveller could obtain anything from a plate of jellied eels to the venereal disease of his choice,

this was a watchful, alert silence; it was the silence of a sleeping cat that had just opened one eye.

Everyone else in the University seemed to be living in a dream, whereas the Librarian wanted nothing more in the whole world than soft fruit, a regular supply of index cards and the opportunity, every month or so, to hop over the wall of the Patrician’s private menagerie.* It was strangely reassuring.

It was the kind of place that looked exactly as you were always going to remember it.

But Rincewind felt he knew holy architecture when he saw it, and the frescoes on the big and, of course, impressive walls above him didn’t look at all religious. For one thing, the participants were enjoying themselves.

“My father always said that death is but a sleep,” said Conina. “Yes, the hat told me that,” said Rincewind, as they turned down a narrow, crowded street between white adobe walls. “But the way I see it, it’s a lot harder to get up in the morning.”

Wizardry is magic for men, not gods. It’s not for us. There was something wrong with it,

“If I say the moon will be full, there will be no argument.”

“It’s where we keep the books, you know. Ninety thousand volumes, isn’t it, Spelter?” “Um? Oh. Yes. About ninety thousand, I suppose.” Coin leaned on the staff and stared. “Burn them,” he said. “All of them.”

“The other night, I looked into his room…the staff, the staff was glowing, it was standing there in the middle of the room like a beacon and the boy was on the bed sobbing, I could feel it reaching out, teaching him, whispering terrible things,

He had a horrible feeling that he was falling in love.

the white-hot lines searing across his imagination never seem to come out exactly as he wants them. It is, in fact, impossible that they ever will.

It is a well-known established fact throughout the many-dimensional worlds of the multiverse that most really great discoveries are owed to one brief moment of inspiration. There’s a lot of spadework first, of course, but what clinches the whole thing is the sight of, say, a falling apple or a boiling kettle or the water slopping over the edge of the bath. Something goes click inside the observer’s head and then everything falls into place.

This is thought of as somehow wonderful. It isn’t. It is tragic. Little particles of inspiration sleet through the universe all the time traveling through the densest matter in the same way that a neutrino passes through a candyfloss haystack, and most of them miss. Even worse, most of the ones that hit the exact cerebral target hit the wrong one.

Many civilizations have recognized this shocking waste and tried various methods to prevent it, most of them involving enjoyable but illegal attempts to tune the mind into the right wavelength by the use of exotic herbage or yeast products. It never works properly.

Life can be very difficult for a little subatomic particle in a great big universe.

Abrim laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. It sounded as though he had had laughter explained to him, probably slowly and repeatedly, but had never heard anyone actually do it.

The Luggage had a way of standing still that was somehow even more terrible than watching it move about.

Rincewind rather enjoyed times like this. They convinced him that he wasn’t mad because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.

He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it.

They weren’t faces built for evil. They didn’t have a fang between them. But there was some common denominator among their expressions that could terrify a thoughtful person.

“It was the way they looked at them as if it just didn’t matter—” said Nijel, shaking his head. “That was the worst bit.” “Yes.”

I’ve managed to survive up till now by not being important enough to die!

And then Nijel uttered the battle cry that Rincewind would never quite forget to the end of his life. “Erm,” he said, “excuse me…”

there wasn’t a man among them who couldn’t hear the hot whine of guilt all down their backbones. But, as so often happens by that strange alchemy of the soul, the guilt made them arrogant and reckless.

The Unseen University isn’t empty, there just aren’t any people there.