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Unfortunately, like many people who are instinctively bad at something, the Archchancellor prided himself on how good at it he was. Ridcully was to management what King Herod was to the Bethlehem Playgroup Association.
Ponder Stibbons was one of those unfortunate people cursed with the belief that if only he found out enough things about the universe it would all, somehow, make sense.
a senior wizard always distrusted a young man who was going places since traditionally his route might be via your jugular.
Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain calibre.
Now it was three o’clock in the morning. Ridcully was good at doing without other people’s sleep.
Rincewind sighed, picked up his stick, beat the hell out of a patch of ground, lay down and went to sleep. Occasionally he screamed under his breath and his legs made running motions, which just showed that he was dreaming.
Death had taken to keeping Rincewind’s lifetimer on a special shelf in his study, in much the way that a zoologist would want to keep an eye on a particularly intriguing specimen.
Rincewind’s hourglass looked like something created by a glassblower who’d had the hiccups in a time machine. According to the amount of actual sand it contained – and Death was pretty good at making this kind of estimate – he should have died long ago. But strange curves and bends and extrusions of glass had developed over the years, and quite often the sand was flowing backwards, or diagonally. Clearly, Rincewind had been hit by so much magic, had been thrust reluctantly through time and space so often that he’d nearly bumped into himself coming the other way, that the precise end of his
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But he pondered whether, if this creature did exist, it was somehow balanced by the eternal coward. The hero with a thousand retreating backs, perhaps. Many cultures had a legend of an undying hero who would one day rise again, so perhaps the balance of nature called for one who wouldn’t.
Rincewind awoke with a scream, to get it over with.
He tried to stop the sneeze as it gathered nasal momentum, but this is impossible for anyone who wants to continue to go through life with their eardrums.
A wizard without a hat was just a sad man with a suspicious taste in clothes. A wizard without a hat wasn’t anyone.
‘I’m not frightened of you,’ he said. ‘Why should I be frightened of you?’ ‘Well,’ said the kangaroo, ‘I could kick your stomach out through your neck.’
‘Will you stop talking about jam and be sensible for a moment!’ Rincewind lowered the sandwich. ‘Good grief, I hope not,’ he said.
He hated weapons, and not just because they’d so often been aimed at him. You got into more trouble if you had a weapon. People shot you instantly if they thought you were going to shoot them. But if you were unarmed, they often stopped to talk. Admittedly, they tended to say things like, ‘You’ll never guess what we’re going to do to you, pal,’ but that took time. And Rincewind could do a lot with a few seconds. He could use them to live longer in.
He wasn’t any good at magic, that he knew. The only curses of his that stood a chance of working were on the lines of ‘May you get rained on at some time in your life,’ and ‘May you lose some small item despite the fact that you put it there only a moment ago.’
mistaking – possibly innocently – Ponder’s expression of futile rage for shameful dismay.
He was not the kind of man to laugh. But he did know, in a mechanical sort of way, how jokes were supposed to go. Ridcully told jokes like a bullfrog did accountancy. They never added up.
‘And stay out,’ he muttered, when he was confident the spider was out of earshot.
Sometimes, when he really needed to, it was possible to get Mr Brain and Mr Mouth all lined up together.
It was an amazing phrase. It was practically magical all by itself. It just . . . made things better. A shark’s got your leg? No worries. You’ve been stung by a jellyfish? No worries! You’re dead? She’ll be right! No worries! Oddly enough, it seemed to work.
A lot of things never entered Mrs Whitlow’s head. She’d decided a long time ago that the world was a lot nicer that way.
Rincewind waved his hat at them and screamed a little, just to relieve his feelings. It didn’t work. The budgerigars thought this was some sort of entertainment. ‘Bug’roff!’ they twittered.
He’d remember those times, sometimes, usually in his sleep, and wake up shouting, ‘Will you pass the potatoes, please!’ Sometimes he remembered the melted butter. Those were the bad days.
The thing about late-night cookery was that it made sense at the time. It always had some logic behind it. It just wasn’t the kind of logic you’d use around midday.
G’DAY, MATE. ‘Oh, no. Please.’ I JUST THOUGHT I SHOULD ENTER INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE THING. A VERY CONVIVIAL PEOPLE, AREN’T THEY? said Death.
‘Just because I’m being hanged in the morning, I mean.’ ARE YOU? THEN I SHALL LOOK FORWARD TO HEARING HOW YOU ESCAPED. I’M DUE TO MEET A MAN IN . . . IN . . . Death’s eyesockets glowed as he interrogated his memory. AH, YES . . . INSIDE A CROCODILE. SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES AWAY, I BELIEVE.
‘What? Then why are you here?’ OH, I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO SEE A FRIENDLY FACE. AND NOW I THINK I HAD BETTER BE GOING. Death stood up.
When treading water in a circle of sharks, a wizard will always consider other wizards to be the most immediate danger.
‘We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?’ ‘Why?’ ‘It saves time.’
‘We’ve got to keep you just drunk enough so that Dibbler’s pies sound tasty, but not so drunk that it causes lasting brain damage.’ ‘That’s a very narrow window we’ve got there,’ said the Dean.
The alchemists say it is the key to immortality, but they say that about orange juice, crusty bread and drinking your own urine. An alchemist would cut his own head off if he thought it’d make him live longer.
Wizards lack the HW chromosome in their genes. Feminist researchers have isolated this as the one which allows people to see the washing-up in the sinks before the life forms growing there have actually invented the wheel.
There’s a certain type of manager who is known by his call of ‘My door is always open’ and it is probably a good idea to beat yourself to death with your own CV rather than work for him. In Ridcully’s case, however, he meant, ‘My door is always open because then, when I’m bored, I can fire my crossbow right across the hall and into the target just above the Bursar’s desk.’
It would be nice to say that this experience taught Ponder a valuable lesson and that he was a lot more considerate towards old people afterwards, and this was true for about five minutes.
