Hogfather

chose Sideney.
    Sideney hadn’t hated Ronnie. He’d been too frightened. He’d wanted to be his friend. Oh, so much. Because that way, just possibly, he wouldn’t have his head trodden on such a lot and would actually get to eat his lunch instead of having it thrown in the privy. And it had been a good day when it had been his lunch.
    And then, despite all Ronnie’s best efforts, Sideney had grown up and gone to university. Occasionally his mother told him how Ronnie was getting on (she assumed, in the way of mothers, that because they had been small boys at school together they had been friends). Apparently he ran a fruit stall and was married to a girl called Angie. * This was not enough punishment, Sideney considered.
    Banjo even breathed like Ronnie, who had to concentrate on such an intellectual exercise and always had one blocked nostril. And his mouth open all the time. He looked as though he was living on invisible plankton.
    He tried to keep his mind on what he was doing and ignore the labored gurgling behind him. A change in its tone made him look up.
    “Fascinating,” said Teatime. “You make it look so easy.”
    Sideney sat back, nervously.
    “Um…it should be fine now, sir,” he said. “It just got a bit scuffed when we were piling up the…” He couldn’t bring himself to say it, he even had to avert his eyes from the heap, it was the sound they’d made. “…the things,” he finished.
    “We don’t need to repeat the spell?” said Teatime.
    “Oh, it’ll keep going forever,” said Sideney. “The simple ones do. It’s just a state change, powered by the…the…it just keeps going…”
    He swallowed.
    “So,” he said, “I was thinking…since you don’t actually need me, sir, perhaps…”
    “Mr. Brown seems to be having some trouble with the locks on the top floor,” said Teatime. “That door we couldn’t open, remember? I’m sure you’ll want to help.”
    Sideney’s face fell.
    “Um, I’m not a locksmith…”
    “They appear to be magical.”
    Sideney opened his mouth to say, “But I’m very bad at magical locks,” and then thought much better of it. He had already fathomed that if Teatime wanted you to do something, and you weren’t very good at it, then your best plan, in fact quite possibly your only plan, was to learn to be good at it very quickly. Sideney was not a fool. He’d seen the way the others reacted around Teatime, and they were men who did things he’d only dreamed of. *
    At which point he was relieved to see Medium Dave walk down the stairs, and it said a lot for the effect of Teatime’s stare that anyone could be relieved to have it punctuated by someone like Medium Dave.
    “We’ve found another guard, sir. Up on the sixth floor. He’s been hiding.”
    Teatime stood up. “Oh dear,” he said. “Not trying to be heroic, was he?”
    “He’s just scared. Shall we let him go?”
    “Let him go?” said Teatime. “Far too messy. I’ll go up there. Come along, Mr. Wizard.”
    Sideney followed him reluctantly up the stairs.
    The tower—if that’s what it was, he thought; he was used to the odd architecture at Unseen University and this made UU look normal—was a hollow tube. No fewer than four spiral staircases climbed the inside, crisscrossing on landings and occasionally passing through one another in defiance of generally accepted physics. But that was practically normal for an alumnus of Unseen University, although technically Sideney had not alumed. What threw the eye was the absence of shadows. You didn’t notice shadows, how they delineated things, how they gave texture to the world, until they weren’t there. The white marble, if that’s what it was, seemed to glow from the inside. Even when the impossible sun shone through a window it barely caused faint gray smudges where honest shadows should be. The tower seemed to avoid darkness.
    That was even more frightening than the times when, after a complicated landing, you found yourself walking up by stepping down the underside of a stair and the distant floor now hung overhead like a ceiling. He’d noticed that even the other men shut their eyes when that happened. Teatime, though, took those stairs three at a time, laughing like a kid with a new toy.
    They reached an upper landing and followed a corridor. The others were gathered by a closed door.
    “He’s barricaded himself in,” said Chickenwire.
    Teatime tapped on it. “You in there,” he said. “Come on out. You