Sourcery

it saw it. It wasn’t about to cause any irritation for anyone. It stared right back up at Rincewind and shrugged, which is pretty clever for a reptile with no shoulders.
    “How long have you been a barbarian hero?”
    “I’m just getting started. I’ve always wanted to be one, you see, and I thought maybe I could pick it up as I went along.” Nijel peered short-sightedly at Rincewind. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
    “It’s a desperate sort of life, by all accounts,” Rincewind volunteered.
    “Have you thought what it might be like selling groceries for the next fifty years?” Nijel muttered darkly.
    Rincewind thought.
    “Is lettuce involved?” he said.
    “Oh yes,” said Nijel, shoving the mysterious book back in his bag. Then he started to pay close attention to the pit walls.
    Rincewind sighed. He liked lettuce. It was so incredibly boring. He had spent years in search of boredom, but had never achieved it. Just when he thought he had it in his grasp his life would suddenly become full of near-terminal interest. The thought that someone could voluntarily give up the prospect of being bored for fifty years made him feel quite weak. With fifty years ahead of him, he thought, he could elevate tedium to the status of an art form. There would be no end to the things he wouldn’t do.
    “Do you know any lamp wick jokes?” he said, settling himself comfortably on the sand.
    “I don’t think so,” said Nijel politely, tapping a slab.
    “I know hundreds. They are very droll. For example, do you know how many trolls it takes to change a lamp wick?”
    “This slab moves,” said Nijel. “Look, it’s a sort of door. Give me a hand.”
    He pushed enthusiastically, his biceps standing out on his arms like peas on a pencil.
    “I expect it’s some sort of secret passage,” he added. “Come on, use a bit of magic, will you? It’s stuck.”
    “Don’t you want to hear the rest of the joke?” said Rincewind, in a pained voice. It was warm and dry down here, with no immediate danger, not counting the snake, which was trying to look inconspicuous. Some people were never satisfied.
    “I think not right at the moment,” said Nijel. “I think I would prefer a bit of magical assistance.”
    “I’m not very good at it,” said Rincewind. “Never got the hang of it, see, it’s more than just pointing a finger at it and saying ‘Kazam—’”
    There was a sound like a thick bolt of octarine lightning zapping into a heavy rock slab and smashing it into a thousand bits of spitting, white-hot shrapnel, and no wonder.
    After a while Nijel slowly got to his feet, beating out the small fires in his vest.
    “Yes,” he said, in the voice of one determined not to lose his self-control. “Well. Very good. We’ll just let it cool down a bit, shall we? And then we, then we, we might as well be going.”
    He cleared his throat a bit.
    “Nnh,” said Rincewind. He was starting fixedly at the end of his finger, holding it out at arm’s length in a manner that suggested he was very sorry he hadn’t got longer arms.
    Nijel peered into the smouldering hole.
    “It seems to open into some kind of room,” he said.
    “Nnh.”
    “After you,” said Nijel. He gave Rincewind a gentle push.
    The wizard staggered forward, bumped his head on the rock and didn’t appear to notice, and then rebounded into the hole.
    Nijel patted the wall, and his brow wrinkled. “Can you feel something?” he said. “Should the stone be trembling?”
    “Nnh.”
    “Are you all right?”
    “Nnh.”
    Nijel put his ear to the stones. “There’s a very strange noise,” he said. “A sort of humming.” A bit of dust shook itself free from the mortar over his head and floated down.
    Then a couple of much heavier rocks danced free from the walls of the pits and thudded into the sand.
    Rincewind had already staggered off down the tunnel, making little shocked noise and completely ignoring the stones that were missing him by inches and, in some cases, hitting him by kilograms.
    If he had been in any state to notice it, he would have known what was happening. The air had a greasy feel and smelled like burning tin. Faint rainbows filmed every point and edge. A magical charge was building up somewhere very close to them, and it was a big one, and it was trying to earth itself.
    A handy wizard, even one as incapable as Rincewind, stood out like a copper lighthouse.
    Nijel blundered out of the rumbling, broiling dust and bumped into