Sourcery

relief from the tier of books above them.
    Rincewind sat down. The books were frightened. In fact they were terrified. The presence of the sourcerer made their spines creep, and the pressure of their attention closed in around him like a vise.
    “All right,” he mumbled, “but what can I do about it?”
    “Oook.” The Librarian gave Rincewind a look that would have been exactly like a quizzical look over the top of a pair of half-moon spectacles, if he had been wearing any, and reached for another broken book.
    “I mean, you know I’m no good at magic.”
    “Oook.”
    “The sourcery that’s about now, it’s terrible stuff. I mean, it’s the original stuff, from right back in the dawn of time. Or around breakfast, at any rate.”
    “Oook.”
    “It’ll destroy everything eventually, won’t it?”
    “Oook.”
    “It’s about time someone put a stop to this sourcery, right?”
    “Oook.”
    “Only it can’t be me, you see. When I came here I thought I could do something, but that tower! It’s so big! It must be proof against all magic! If really powerful wizards won’t do anything about it, how can I?”
    “Oook,” agreed the Librarian, sewing a ruptured spine.
    “So, you see, I think someone else can save the world this time. I’m no good at it.”
    The ape nodded, reached across and lifted Rincewind’s hat from his head.
    “Hey!”
    The Librarian ignored him, picked up a pair of shears.
    “Look, that’s my hat, if you don’t mind don’t you dare do that to my —”
    He leapt across the floor and was rewarded with a thump across the side of the head, which would have astonished him if he’d had time to think about it; the Librarian might shuffle around the place like a good-natured wobbly balloon, but underneath that oversized skin was a framework of superbly-cantilevered bone and muscle that could drive a fistful of calloused knuckles through a thick oak plank. Running into the Librarian’s arm was like hitting a hairy iron bar.
    Wuffles started to bounce up and down, yelping with excitement.
    Rincewind screamed a hoarse, untranslatable yell of fury, bounced off the wall, snatched up a fallen rock as a crude club, kicked forward and stopped dead.
    The Librarian was crouched in the center of the floor with the shears touching—but not yet cutting—the hat.
    And he was grinning at Rincewind.
    They stood like a frozen tableau for some seconds. Then the ape dropped the shears, flicked several imaginary flecks of dust off the hat, straightened the point, and placed it on Rincewind’s head.
    A few shocked moments after this Rincewind realized that he was holding up, at arm’s length, a very large and extremely heavy rock. He managed to force it away on one side before it recovered from the shock and remembered to fall on him.
    “I see,” he said, sinking back against the wall and rubbing his elbows. “And all that’s supposed to tell me something, is it? A moral lesson, let Rincewind confront his true self, let him work out what he’s really prepared to fight for. Eh? Well, it was a very cheap trick. And I’ve news for you. If you think it worked—” he snatched the hat brim—“if you think it worked. If you think I’ve. You’ve got another thought. Listen, it’s. If you think.”
    His voice stuttered into silence. Then he shrugged.
    “All right. But when you get down to it, what can I actually do?”
    The Librarian replied with an expansive gesture that indicated, as clearly as if he had said “oook,” that Rincewind was a wizard with a hat, a library of magical books and a tower. This could be regarded as everything a magical practitioner could need. An ape, a small terrier with halitosis and a lizard in a jar were optional extras.
    Rincewind felt a slight pressure on his foot. Wuffles, who was extremely slow on the uptake, had fastened his toothless gums on the toe of Rincewind’s boot and was giving it a vicious suck.
    He picked the little dog up by the scruff of its neck and the bristly stub that, for the want of a better word, it called its tail, and gently lifted it sideways.
    “Okay,” he said. “You’d better tell me what’s been happening here.”

    From the Carrack Mountains, overlooking the vast cold Sto Plain in the middle of which Ankh-Morpork sprawled like a bag of dropped groceries, the view was particularly impressive. Mishits and ricochets from the magical battle were expanding outward and upwards, in a bowl-shaped cloud of curdled air at the