Sourcery

kitchens.
    He darted for it, leaping down the unseen steps and landing heavily and unexpectedly on uneven flags. A little moonlight filtered through a grating in the distance and somewhere up there, he knew, was a doorway into the outside world.
    Staggering a little, his ankles aching, the noise of his own breath booming in his ears as though he’d stuck his entire head in a seashell, Spelter set off across the endless dark desert of the floor.
    Things clanked underfoot. There were no rats here now, of course, but the kitchen had fallen into disuse lately—the University’s cooks had been the best in the world, but now any wizard could conjure up meals beyond mere culinary skill. The big copper pans hung neglected on the wall, their sheen already tarnishing, and the kitchen ranges under the giant chimney arch were filled with nothing but chilly ash…
    The staff lay across the back door like a bar. It spun up as Spelter tottered toward it and hung, radiating quiet malevolence, a few feet away. Then, quite smoothly, it began to glide toward him.
    He backed away, his feet slipping on the greasy stones. A thump across the back of his things made him yelp, but as he reached behind him he found it was only one of the chopping blocks.
    His hand groped desperately across its scarred surface and, against all hope, found a cleaver buried in the wood. In an instinctive gesture as ancient as mankind, Spelter’s fingers closed around its handle.
    He was out of breath and out of patience and out of space and time and also scared, very nearly, out of his mind.
    So when the staff hovered in front of him he wrenched the chopper up and around with all the strength he could muster….
    And hesitated. All that was wizardly in him cried out against the destruction of so much power, power that perhaps even now could be used, used by him…
    And the staff swung around so that its axis was pointing directly at him.
    And several corridors away, the Librarian stood braced with his back against the Library door, watching the blue and white flashes that flickered across the floor. He heard the distant snap of raw energy, and a sound that started low and ended up in zones of pitch that even Wuffles, lying with his paws over his head, could not hear.
    And then there was a faint, ordinary tinkling noise, such as might be made by a fused and twisted metal cleaver dropping onto flagstones.
    It was the sort of noise that makes the silence that comes after it roll forward like a warm avalanche.
    The Librarian wrapped the silence around him like a cloak and stood staring up at the rank on rank of books, each one pulsing faintly in the glow of its own magic. Shelf after shelf looked down * at him. They had heard. He could feel the fear.
    The orangutan stood statue-still for several minutes, and then appeared to reach a decision. He knuckled his way across to his desk and, after much rummaging, produced a heavy key-ring bristling with keys. Then he went back and stood in the middle of the floor and said, very deliberately, “Oook.”
    The books craned forward on their shelves. Now he had their full attention.

    “What is this place?” said Conina.
    Rincewind looked around him, and made a guess.
    They were still in the heart of Al Khali. He could hear the hum of it beyond the walls. But in the middle of the teeming city someone had cleared a vast space, walled it off, and planted a garden so romantically natural that it looked as real as a sugar pig.
    “It looks like someone has taken twice five miles of inner, city and girdled them around with walls and towers,” he hazarded.
    “What a strange idea,” said Conina.
    “Well, some of the religions here—well, when you die, you see, they think you go to this sort of garden, where there’s all this sort of music and, and,” he continued, wretchedly, “sherbet and, and—young women.”
    Conina took in the green splendor of the walled garden, with its peacocks, intricate arches and slightly wheezy fountains. A dozen reclining women stared back at her, impassively. A hidden string orchestra was playing the complicated Klatchian bhong music.
    “I’m not dead,” she said. “I’m sure I would have remembered. Besides, this isn’t my idea of paradise.” She looked critically at the reclining figures, and added, “I wonder who does their hair?”
    A sword point prodded her in the small of the back, and the two of them set out along the ornate path toward a small domed pavilion surrounded by