The Colour of Magic

eight of the clock,” it snarled. The lid slammed shut, almost trapping the Weasel’s fingers.
    With an oath the Weasel hurled the time-teller far out into the heather, where it possibly hit a stone. Something, in any event, caused the case to split; there was a vivid octarine flash and a whiff of brimstone as the time being vanished into whatever demonic dimension it called home.
    “What did you do that for?” said Bravd, who hadn’t been close enough to hear the words.
    “Do what?” said the Weasel. “I didn’t do anything. Nothing happened at all. Come on—we’re wasting opportunities!”
    Bravd nodded. Together they turned their steeds and galloped toward ancient Ankh, and honest enchantments.

2
    T HE S ENDING OF E IGHT
    The road from Ankh-Morpork to Chirm is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than useful.
    Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard (B. Mgc., Unseen University [failed]). It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant—he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word—that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.
    Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant “idiot.”
    As they rode leisurely through the thyme-scented, bee-humming air, Rincewind pondered on the experiences of the last few days. While the little foreigner was obviously insane, he was also generous and considerably less lethal than half the people the wizard had mixed with in the city. Rincewind rather liked him. Disliking him would be like kicking a puppy.
    Currently Twoflower was showing a great interest in the theory and practice of magic.
    “It all seems, well, rather useless to me,” he said. “I always thought that, you know, a wizard just said the magic words and that was that. Not all this tedious memorizing.”
    Rincewind agreed moodily. He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears.
    He went on to add that some of the ancient magic could still be found in its raw state, recognizable—to the initiated—by the eightfold shape it made in the crystalline structure of space-time. There was the metal octiron, for example, and the gas octogen. Both radiated dangerous amounts of raw enchantment.
    “It’s all very depressing,” he finished.
    “Depressing?”
    Rincewind turned in his saddle and glanced at Twoflower’s Luggage, which was currently ambling along on its little legs, occasionally snapping its lid at butterflies. He sighed.
    “Rincewind thinks he ought to be able to harness the lightning,” said the picture imp, who was observing the passing scene from the tiny doorway of the box slung around Twoflower’s neck. He had spent the morning painting picturesque views and quaint scenes for his master, and had been allowed to knock off for a smoke.
    “When I said harness I didn’t mean harness,” snapped Rincewind. “I meant, well, I just meant that—I dunno, I just can’t think of the right words. I just think the world ought to be more sort of organized.”
    “That’s just fantasy,” said Twoflower.
    “I know. That’s the trouble.” Rincewind sighed again. It was all very well going on about pure logic and how the universe was ruled by logic and the harmony of numbers, but the plain fact of the matter was that the Disc was manifestly traversing space on the back of a giant turtle and the gods had a