Interesting Times

amphibian and, indeed, start jumping around the room on a pogo stick.
    Alcohol bridged the diplomatic gap nicely. Sometimes Lord Vetinari invited the Archchancellor to the palace for a convivial drink. And of course the Archchancellor went, because it would be bad manners not to. And everyone understood the position, and everyone was on their best behavior, and thus civil unrest and slime on the carpet were averted.
    It was a beautiful afternoon. Lord Vetinari was sitting in the palace gardens, watching the butterflies with an expression of mild annoyance. He found something very slightly offensive about the way they just fluttered around enjoying themselves in an unprofitable way.
    He looked up.
    “Ah, Archchancellor,” he said. “So good to see you. Do sit down. I trust you are well?”
    “Yes indeed,” said Mustrum Ridcully. “And yourself? You are in good health?”
    “Never better. The weather, I see, has turned out nice again.”
    “I thought yesterday was particularly fine, certainly.”
    “Tomorrow, I am told, could well be even better.”
    “We could certainly do with a fine spell.”
    “Yes, indeed.”
    “Yes.”
    “Ah…”
    “Certainly.”
    They watched the butterflies. A butler brought long, cool drinks.
    “What is it they actually do with the flowers?” said Lord Vetinari.
    “What?”
    The Patrician shrugged. “Never mind. It was not at all important. But—since you are here, Archchancellor, having dropped by on your way to something infinitely more important, I am sure, most kind—I wonder if you could tell me: who is the Great Wizard?”
    Ridcully considered this.
    “The Dean, possibly,” he said. “He must be all of twenty stone.”
    “Somehow I feel that is not perhaps the right answer,” said Lord Vetinari. “I suspect from context that ‘great’ means superior.”
    “Not the Dean, then,” said Ridcully.
    Lord Vetinari tried to recollect the faculty of Unseen University. The mental picture that emerged was of a small range of foothills in pointy hats.
    “The context does not, I feel, suggest the Dean,” he said.
    “Er…what context would this be?” said Ridcully.
    The Patrician picked up his walking stick.
    “Come this way,” he said. “I suppose you had better see for yourself. It is very vexing.”
    Ridcully looked around with interest as he followed Lord Vetinari. He did not often have a chance to see the gardens, which had been written up in the “How Not To Do It” section of gardening manuals everywhere.
    They had been laid out, and a truer phrase was never used, by the renowned or at least notorious landscape gardener and all round inventor “Bloody Stupid” Johnson, whose absent-mindedness and blindness to elementary mathematics made every step a walk with danger. His genius…well, as far as Ridcully understood it, his genius was exactly the opposite of whatever kind of genius it was that built earthworks that tapped the secret yet beneficent forces of the leylines.
    No one was quite certain what forces Bloody Stupid’s designs tapped, but the chiming sundial frequently exploded, the crazy paving had committed suicide and the cast-iron garden furniture was known to have melted on three occasions.
    The Patrician led the way through a gate and into something like a dovecot. A creaking wooden stairway led around the inside. A few of Ankh-Morpork’s indestructible feral pigeons muttered and sniggered in the shadows.
    “What’s this?” said Ridcully, as the stairs groaned under him.
    The Patrician took a key out of his pocket. “I have always understood that Mr. Johnson originally planned this to be a beehive,” he said. “However, in the absence of bees ten feet long we have found…other uses.”
    He unlocked a door to a wide, square room with a big unglazed window in each wall. Each rectangle was surrounded by a wooden arrangement to which was affixed a bell on a spring. It was apparent that anything large enough, entering by one of the windows, would cause the bell to ring.
    In the center of the room, standing on a table, was the largest bird Ridcully had ever seen. It turned and fixed him with a beady yellow eye.
    The Patrician reached into a pocket and took out a jar of anchovies. “This one caught us rather unexpectedly,” he said. “It must be almost ten years since a message last arrived. We used to keep a few fresh mackerel on ice.”
    “Isn’t that a Pointless Albatross?” said Ridcully.
    “Indeed,” said Lord Vetinari. “And