The Colour of Magic

boredom. And boredom was best.
    Had either of them happened to look down at that moment they would have noticed a strange v-shaped wave surging through the water far below them, its apex pointing directly at Tethis’s island. But they weren’t looking. The twenty-four hydrophobic magicians were looking, but to them it was just another piece of dreadfulness, not really any different from the liquid horror around it. They were probably right.

    Sometime before all this the blazing pirate ship had hissed under the waves and started the long slow slide toward the distant ooze. It was more distant than average, because directly under the stricken keel was the Gorunna Trench—a chasm in the Disc’s surface that was so black, so deep and so reputedly evil that even the krakens went there fearfully, and in pairs. In less reputedly evil chasms the fish went about with natural lights on their heads and on the whole managed quite well. In Gorunna they left them unlit and, insofar as it is possible for something without legs to creep, they crept; they tended to bump into things, too. Horrible things.
    The water around the ship turned from green to purple, from purple to black, from black to a darkness so complete that blackness itself seemed merely gray by comparison. Most of its timbers had already been crushed into splinters under the intense pressure.
    It spiraled past groves of nightmare polyps and drifting forests of seaweed which glowed with faint, diseased colors. Things brushed it briefly with soft, cold tentacles as they darted away into the freezing silence.
    Something rose up from the murk and ate it in one mouthful.
    Some time later the islanders on a little rimward atoll were amazed to find, washed into their little local lagoon, the wave-rocked corpse of a hideous sea monster, all beaks, eyes and tentacles. They were further astonished at its size, since it was rather larger than their village. But their surprise was tiny compared to the huge, stricken expression on the face of the dead monster, which appeared to have been trampled to death.
    Somewhat farther rimward of the atoll a couple of little boats, trolling a net for the ferocious free-swimming oysters which abounded in those seas, caught something that dragged both vessels for several miles before one captain had the presence of mind to sever the lines.
    But even his bewilderment was as nothing compared to that of the islanders on the last atoll in the archipelago. During the following night they were awakened by a terrific crashing and splintering noise coming from their minute jungle; when some of the bolder spirits went to investigate in the morning they found that the trees had been smashed in a broad swath that started on the hubmost shore of the atoll and made a line of total destruction pointing precisely Edgewise, littered with broken lianas, crushed bushes and a few bewildered and angry oysters.

    They were high enough now to see the wide curve of the Rim sweeping away from them, lapped by the fluffy clouds that mercifully hid the waterfall for most of the time. From up here the sea, a deep blue dappled with cloud-shadows, looked almost inviting. Rincewind shuddered.
    “Excuse me,” he said. The hooded figure turned from its contemplation of the distant haze and raised its wand threateningly.
    “I don’t want to use this,” it said.
    “You don’t?” said Rincewind.
    “What is it, anyway?” said Twoflower.
    “Ajandurah’s Wand of Utter Negativity,” said Rincewind. “And I wish you’d stop waving it about. It might go off,” he added, nodding at the wand’s glittering point. “I mean, it’s all very flattering, all this magic being used just for our benefit, but there’s no need to go quite that far. And—”
    “ Shut up . The figure reached up and pulled back its hood, revealing itself to be a most unusually tinted young woman. Her skin was black. Not the dark brown of Urabewe, or the polished blue-black of monsoon-haunted Klatch, but the deep black of midnight at the bottom of a cave. Her hair and eyebrows were the color of moonlight. There was the same pale sheen around her lips. She looked about fifteen, and very frightened.
    Rincewind couldn’t help noticing that the hand holding the wand was shaking; this was because a piece of sudden death, wobbling uncertainly a mere five feet from your nose, is very hard to miss. It dawned on him—very slowly, because it was a completely new sensation—that someone in the world