The Colour of Magic

mechanical aptitude than imagination. No wonder, then, that the Disc gods spend more time in bickering than in omnicognizance.
    On this particular day Blind Io, by dint of constant vigilance the chief of the gods, sat with his chin on his hand and looked at the gaming board on the red marble table in front of him. Blind Io had got his name because, where his eye sockets should have been, there were nothing but two areas of blank skin. His eyes, of which he had an impressively large number, led a semi-independent life of their own. Several were currently hovering above the table.
    The gaming board was a carefully carved map of the Discworld, overprinted with squares. A number of beautifully modeled playing pieces were now occupying some of the squares. A human onlooker would, for example, have recognized in two of them the likenesses of Bravd and the Weasel. Others represented yet more heroes and champions, of which the Disc had a more than adequate supply.
    Still in the game were Io, Offler the Crocodile God, Zephyrus the god of slight breezes, Fate, and the Lady. There was an air of concentration around the board now that the lesser players had been removed from the Game. Chance had been an early casualty, running her hero into a full house of armed gnolls (the result of a lucky throw by Offler) and shortly afterward Night has cashed his chips, pleading an appointment with Destiny. Several minor deities had drifted up and were kibitzing over the shoulders of the players.
    Side bets were made that the Lady would be the next to leave the board. Her last champion of any standing was now a pinch of potash in the ruins of still-smoking Ankh-Morpork, and there were hardly any pieces that she could promote to first rank.
    Blind Io took up the dice box, which was a skull whose various orifices had been stoppered with rubies, and with several of his eyes on the Lady he rolled three fives.
    She smiled. This was the nature of the Lady’s eyes: they were bright green, lacking iris or pupil, and they glowed from within.
    The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one god, craned forward to peer at them.
    “A wenegade wiffard and fome fort of clerk,” said Offler the Crocodile God, hindered as usual by his tusks. “Well, weally!” With one claw he pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the center of the table.
    The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dice cup and held it as steady as a rock, yet all the gods could hear the three cubes rattling about inside. And then she sent them bouncing across the table.
    A six. A three. A five.
    Something was happening to the five, however. Battered by the chance collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun gently and came down a seven.
    Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides.
    “ Come on ,” he said wearily. “Play fair.”

1
    T HE C OLOR OF M AGIC
    Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork. Where it licked the Wizards’ Quarter it burned blue and green and was even laced with strange sparks of the eighth color, octarine; where its outriders found their way into the vats and oil stores all along Merchant Street it progressed in a series of blazing fountains and explosions; in the streets of the perfume blenders it burned with a sweetness; where it touched bundles of rare and dry herbs in the storerooms of the drugmasters it made men go mad and talk to God.
    By now the whole of downtown Morpork was alight, and the richer and worthier citizens of Ankh on the far bank were bravely responding to the situation by feverishly demolishing the bridges. But already the ships in the Morpork docks—laden with grain, cotton and timber, and coated with tar—were blazing merrily and, their moorings burnt to ashes, were breasting the river Ankh on the ebb tide, igniting riverside palaces and bowers as they drifted like drowning fireflies toward the sea. In any case, sparks were riding the breeze and touching down far across the river in hidden gardens and remote rickyards.
    The smoke from the merry burning rose miles high, in a wind-sculpted black column that could be seen across the whole of the Discworld.
    It was certainly impressive from the cool, dark hilltop a few leagues away, where two figures were watching with considerable interest.
    The taller of the pair was chewing on a chicken leg