Eric

bugle, but the notes gurgled into silence after a few bars.
    “Bit of a fight going on out there, by the sound of it,” said Rincewind. “People winning their spurs, doing heroic deeds of valor, being noticed by superior officers, that sort of thing. And here’s you hanging around in here with us.”
    “I’ve got to stick to my post,” said the guard.
    “Exactly the right attitude,” said Rincewind. “Never mind about everyone else out there fighting valiantly to defend their city and womenfolk against the foe. You stop in here and guard us. That’s the spirit. They’ll probably put up a statue to you in the city square, if there’s one left. ‘He did his duty,’ they’ll write on it.”
    The soldier appeared to think about this, and while he was doing so there was a terrible splintering creak from the direction of the main gates.
    “Look,” he said desperately, “if I just pop out for a moment…”
    “Don’t you worry about us,” said Rincewind encouragingly. “It’s not even as if we’re armed.”
    “Right,” said the soldier. “Thanks.”
    He gave Rincewind a worried smile and hurried off in the direction of the noise. Eric looked at Rincewind with something like admiration.
    “That was actually quite amazing,” he said.
    “Going to go a long way, that lad,” said Rincewind. “A sound military thinker if ever I saw one. Come on. Let’s run away.”
    “Where to?”
    Rincewind sighed. He’d tried to make his basic philosophy clear time and again, and people never got the message.
    “Don’t you worry about to ,” he said. “In my experience that always takes care of itself. The important word is away .”

    The captain raised his head cautiously over the barricade, and snarled.
    “It’s just a little box, sergeant,” he snapped. “It’s not even as if it could hold one or two men.”
    “Beg pardon, sir,” said the sergeant, and his face was the face of a man whose world has changed a lot in a few short minutes. “It holds at least four, sir. Corporal Disuse and his squad, sir. I sent them out to open it, sir.”
    “Are you drunk, sergeant?”
    “Not yet, sir,” said the sergeant, with feeling.
    “Little boxes don’t eat people, sergeant.”
    “After that it got angry, sir. You can see what it did to the gates.”
    The captain peered over the broken timbers again.
    “I suppose it grew legs and walked over there, did it?” he said sarcastically.
    The sergeant broke into a relieved grin. At last they seemed to be on the same wavelength.
    “Got it in one, sir,” he said. “Legs. Hundreds of the little bleeders, sir.”
    The captain glared at him. The sergeant put on the poker face that has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower-ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach. The captain was eighteen and fresh from the academy, where he had passed with flying colors in such subjects as Classical Tactics, Valedictory Odes and Military Grammar. The sergeant was fifty-five, and instead of an education he had spent about forty years attacking or being attacked by harpies, humans, cyclopses, furies and horrible things on legs. He felt put upon.
    “Well, I’m going to have a look at it, sergeant—”
    “—not a good plan, sir, if I may—”
    “—and after I’ve had a look at it, sergeant, there is going to be trouble.”
    The sergeant threw him a salute. “Right you are, sir,” he predicted.
    The captain snorted and climbed over the barricade toward the box which sat, silent and unmoving, in its circle of devastation. The sergeant, meanwhile, slid into a sitting position behind the stoutest timber he could find and, with great determination, pulled his helmet down hard over his ears.

    Rincewind crept through the streets of the city, with Eric tagging along behind.
    “Are we going to find Elenor?” the boy said.
    “No,” said Rincewind firmly. “What we’re going to do is, we’re going to find another way out. And we’re going to go out through it.”
    “That’s not fair!”
    “She’s thousands of years older than you! I mean, attraction of the mature woman, all right , but it’d never work out.”
    “I demand that you take me to her,” wailed Eric. “Avaunt!”
    Rincewind stopped so sharply that Eric walked into him.
    “Listen,” he said. “We’re in the middle of the most famously fatuous war there has ever been, any minute now thousands of warriors will be locked in