Interesting Times

can’t trust flies. They may look small but they can turn nasty.”
    “Kids generally, I mean.”
    “Yes? Well?”
    “He is an Emperor. No one ever dared tell him it was wrong. It’s just a matter of, you know, scaling up. All the five families fight among themselves for the crown. He killed his nephew to become Emperor. No one has ever told him that it’s not right to keep killing people for fun. At least, no one who has ever managed to get to the end of the first sentence. And the Hongs and the Fangs and the Tangs and the Sungs and the McSweeneys have been killing one another for thousands of years. It’s all part of the royal succession.”
    “McSweeneys?”
    “Very old-established family.”
    Rincewind nodded gloomily. It was probably like breeding horses. If you have a system where treacherous murderers tend to win, you end up breeding really treacherous murderers. You end up with a situation where it’s dangerous to lean over a cradle…
    There was another scream.
    Rincewind started kicking at the stones.
    A key turned in the lock.
    “Oh,” said Twoflower.
    But the door didn’t open.
    Finally Rincewind walked over and tried the big iron ring.
    The door swung outwards, but not too far because the recumbent body of a guard makes an unusual but efficient doorstop.
    There was a whole ring of keys hanging from the one in the door…
    An inexperienced prisoner would simply have run for it. But Rincewind was a post-graduate student in the art of staying alive, and knew that in circumstances like these much the best thing to do was let out every single prisoner, pat each one hurriedly on the back and say, “Quick! They’re coming for you!” and then go and sit somewhere nice and quiet until the pursuit has disappeared in the distance.
    He opened the door to Twoflower’s cell first.
    The little man was skinnier and grubbier than he remembered, and had a wispy beard, but in one very significant way he had the feature that Rincewind remembered so well—the big, beaming, trusting smile that suggested that anything bad currently happening to him was just some sort of laughable mistake and would be bound to be sorted out by reasonable people.
    “Rincewind! It is you! I certainly never thought I’d see you again!” he said.
    “Yes, I thought something on those lines,” said Rincewind.
    Twoflower looked past Rincewind at the fallen guard.
    “Is he dead?” he said, speaking of a man with a sword half buried in his back.
    “Extremely likely.”
    “Did you do that?”
    “I was inside the cell!”
    “Amazing! Good trick!”
    Despite several years of exposure to the facts of the matter, Rincewind remembered, Twoflower had never really wanted to grasp the fact that his companion had the magical abilities of the common house fly. It was useless to try to dissuade him. It just meant that modesty was added to the list of non-existent virtues.
    He tried some of the keys in other cell doors. Various raggedy people emerged, blinking in the slightly better light. One of them, turning his body slightly in order to get it through the door, was Three Yoked Oxen. From the look of him he’d been beaten up, but this might just have been someone’s attempt to attract his attention.
    “This is Rincewind,” said Twoflower proudly. “The Great Wizard. Did you know he killed the guard from inside the cell?”
    They politely inspected the corpse.
    “I didn’t, really,” said Rincewind.
    “And he’s modest, too!”
    “Long Life To The People’s Endeavor!” said Three Yoked Oxen through rather swollen lips.
    “‘Mine’s A Pint!”’ said Rincewind. “Here’s bigfella keys belong door, you go lettee people outee chopchop.”
    One of the freed prisoners limped to the end of the passage.
    “There’s a dead guard here,” he said.
    “It wasn’t me,” said Rincewind plaintively. “I mean, perhaps I wished they were dead, but—”
    People edged away. You didn’t want to be too close to anyone who could wish like that.
    If this had been Ankh-Morpork someone would have said, “Oh, yeah, sure, he magically stabbed them in the back?” But that was because people in Ankh-Morpork knew Rincewind, and they knew that if a wizard really wanted you dead you’d have no back left to stab.
    Three Yoked Oxen had been able to master the technical business of opening doors. More swung open…
    “Lotus Blossom?” said Rincewind.
    She clung to Oxen’s arm and smiled at Rincewind. Other members of the cadre trooped