Interesting Times

and almost ran into another guard.
    Butterfly didn’t even stop. She took a ladylike step, whirled around on one foot, and kicked the man so hard on his ear that he spun on his own axis and landed on his head.
    She paused, panted, and tucked a hair back into place.
    “We should split up,” she said.
    “Oh, no!” said Rincewind. “I mean, I must protect you!”
    “I’ll head back to the others. You lead the guards away somewhere—”
    “Can you all do that?”
    “Of course,” said Butterfly, testily. “I told you we fought the guards. Now, if we split up one of us is bound to escape. The murderers! We were supposed to take the blame for that!”
    “Didn’t I try to tell you? I thought you wanted him dead!”
    “Yes, but we’re rebels. They were palace guards!”
    “Er—”
    “No time. See you in Heaven.”
    She darted away.
    “Oh.”
    Rincewind looked around. It had all gone quiet.
    Guards appeared at the end of the corridor, but cautiously, as befitted people who’d just met Butterfly.
    “There!”
    “Is it her?”
    “No, it’s him!”
    “Get him!”
    He accelerated again, rounded a corner, and found that he was in a cul-de-sac that would undoubtedly, given the sounds behind, become a dead end. But there was a pair of doors. He kicked them open, ran inside, and slowed…
    The room inside was dark, but the sound and air suggested a large space and a certain flatulent component indicated some kind of stable.
    There was some light, though, from a fire. Rincewind trotted towards it and saw that it was under a huge cauldron, man-sized, full of boiling rice.
    And now that his eyes were accustomed to the gloom he realized that there were shapes lying on slabs along both walls of an enormous room.
    They were snoring gently.
    They were, in fact, people. They might even have been humans, or at least had humans in their ancestry before someone, hundreds of years ago, had said, “Let’s see how big and fat we can breed people. Let’s try for really big bastards.”
    Each giant frame was dressed in what looked like a nappy to Rincewind’s eyes and was dozing happily alongside a bowl holding enough rice to explode twenty people, just in case it woke up in the night and felt like a light snack.
    A couple of his pursuers appeared in the doorway, and stopped. Then they advanced, but very cautiously, carefully watching the gently moving mounds.
    “Oi, oi, oi!” shouted Rincewind.
    The men stopped and stared at him.
    “Wakey wakey! Let’s see the rising sons!” He grabbed a mighty ladle and banged it on the rice cauldron.
    “Up you get! Hands off-er-whatever you can find and on with socks!”
    The sleepers stirred.
    “Oooorrrrr?”
    “Ooooaaaoooooor!”
    The room shook as forty tree-trunk legs swung off the slabs. Flesh rearranged itself so that, in the gloom, Rincewind appeared to be being watched by twenty small pyramids.
    “Haaaroooooohhhh?”
    “Those men,” said Rincewind, pointing desperately at his pursuers, who were slowly backing away, “those men have a pork sandwich!”
    “Oorrryorrraaah?”
    “Oooorrrr?”
    “With mustard!”
    “Oooorrrr!”
    Twenty very small heads turned. A total of eighty specialized neurons fired into life.
    And the floor shook. The wrestlers started to move hopefully towards the men, in a slow but deliberate run designed to be halted only by collision with another wrestler or a continent.
    “Oooorrr!”
    Rincewind dashed for the far door and burst through it. A couple of men were sitting in a small room drinking tea and playing shibo , watched by a third.
    “The wrestlers are wrestless!” he shouted. “I think you’ve got a stampede going on!”
    A man threw down his shibo tiles. “Blast! And it’s been at least an hour since they were fed!”
    The men grabbed various nets and prods and items of protective clothing, leaving Rincewind alone.
    There was another door. He sashayed through it. He’d never essayed a sashay before, but he reckoned he was due a sashay for quick thinking.
    There was another passage. He ran down it, on the basis that absence of pursuit is no reason to stop running.

    Lord Hong was folding paper.
    He was an expert at it because when he did it he gave it his full attention. Lord Hong had a mind like a knife, although possibly a knife with a curved blade.
    The door slid aside. A guard, red in the face from running, threw himself on to the floor.
    “O Lord Hong, who is exalted—”
    “Yes, indeed,” said Lord Hong distantly,