Sourcery

Rincewind, “the important word is from .”
    “I don’t trust this man,” said Nijel. “I try not to judge from first impressions, but I definitely think he’s up to no good.”
    “He had you thrown in a snake pit!”
    “Perhaps I should have taken the hint.”
    The vizier started to mutter. Even Rincewind, whose few talents included a gift for languages, didn’t recognize it, but it sounded like the kind of language designed specifically for muttering, the words curling out like scythes at ankle height, dark and red and merciless. They made complicated swirls in the air, and then drifted gently toward the doors of the tower.
    Where they touched the white marble it turned black and crumbled.
    As the remains drifted to the ground a wizard stepped through and looked Abrim up and down.
    Rincewind was used to the dressy ways of wizards, but this one was really impressive, his robe so padded and crenellated and buttressed in fantastic folds and creases that it had probably been designed by an architect. The matching hat looked like a wedding cake that had collided intimately with a Christmas tree.
    The actual face, peering through the small gap between the baroque collar and the filigreed fringe of the brim, was a bit of a disappointment. At some time in the past it had thought its appearance would be improved by a thin, scruffy mustache. It had been wrong.
    “That was our bloody door!” it said. “You’re really going to regret this!”
    Abrim folded his arms.
    This seemed to infuriate the other wizard. He flung up his arms, untangled his hands from the lace on his sleeves, and sent a flare screaming across the gap.
    It struck Abrim in the chest and rebounded in a gout of incandescence, but when the blue after-images allowed Rincewind to see he saw Abrim, unharmed.
    His opponent frantically patted out the last of the little fires in his own clothing and looked up with murder in his eyes.
    “You don’t seem to understand,” he rasped. “It’s sourcery you’re dealing with now. You can’t fight sourcery.”
    “ I can use sourcery ,” said Abrim.
    The wizard snarled and lofted a fireball, which burst harmlessly inches from Abrim’s dreadful grin.
    A look of acute puzzlement passed across the other one’s face. He tried again, sending lines of blue-hot magic lancing straight from infinity toward Abrim’s heart. Abrim waved them away.
    “ Your choice is simple ,” he said. “ You can join me, or you can die .”
    It was at this point that Rincewind became aware of a regular scraping sound close to his ear. It had an unpleasant metallic ring.
    He half-turned, and felt the familiar and very uncomfortable prickly feeling of Time slowing down around him.
    Death paused in the act of running a whetstone along the edge of his scythe and gave him a nod of acknowledgment, as between one professional and another.
    He put a bony digit to his lips, or rather, to the place where his lips would have been if he’d had lips.
    All wizards can see Death, but they don’t necessarily want to.
    There was a popping in Rincewind’s ears and the specter vanished.
    Abrim and the rival wizard were surrounded by a corona of randomized magic, and it was evidently having no effect on Abrim. Rincewind drifted back into the land of the living just in time to see the man reach out and grab the wizard by his tasteless collar.
    “ You cannot defeat me ,” he said in the hat’s voice. “ I have had two thousand years of harnessing power to my own ends. I can draw my power from your power. Yield to me or you won’t even have time to regret it .”
    The wizard struggled and, unfortunately, let pride win over caution.
    “Never!” he said.
    “ Die ,” suggested Abrim.
    Rincewind had seen many strange things in his life, most of them with extreme reluctance, but he had never seen anyone actually killed by magic.
    Wizards didn’t kill ordinary people because a) they seldom noticed them and b) it wasn’t considered sporting and c) besides, who’d do all the cooking and growing food and things. And killing a brother wizard with magic was well-nigh impossible on account of the layers of protective spells that any cautious wizard maintained about his person at all times. * The first thing a young wizard learns at Unseen University—apart from where his peg is, and which way to the lavatory—is that he must protect himself at all times.
    Some people think this is paranoia, but it isn’t. Paranoids only think everyone is out