The Last Continent

waved his hat at them and screamed a little, just to relieve his feelings. It didn’t work. The budgerigars thought this was some sort of entertainment.
    “Bug’roff!” they twittered.
    Rincewind gave up, stamped on the ground a few times, and tried to sleep.
    When he awoke, it was to a sound very much like a donkey being sawn in half. It was a kind of rhythmic scream of pain, anguished and forlorn, setting the teeth of the world on edge.
    Rincewind raised his head cautiously over the scrub.
    A windmill was spinning in the breeze, turning this way and that as stray gusts batted its tail fin.
    Rincewind was seeing more of these, dotted across the landscape, and thought: If all the water’s underground, that’s a good idea…
    There was a mob of sheep hanging around the base of this one. They didn’t back off, but watched him carefully as he approached. He saw why. The trough below the pump was empty. The fan was spinning, grinding out its mournful squeak, but no water was coming out of the pipe.
    The thirsty sheep looked up at him.
    “Er…don’t look at me,” he mumbled. “I’m a wizard. We’re not supposed to be good at machinery.”
    No, but we are supposed to be good at magic, said an accusing voice in his head.
    “Maybe I can see if something’s come loose, though. Or something,” he muttered.
    Impelled by the vaguely accusing woolly stares, he clambered up the rickety tower and tried to look efficient. There didn’t seem to be anything wrong, except that the metallic groaning was getting louder.
    “Can’t see any—”
    Something that had finally been tortured beyond endurance broke, somewhere down in the tower. It shook, and the windmill spun free, dragging a broken rod which smashed heavily on the windmill’s casing with every revolution.
    Rincewind half fell, half slid back down to the ground.
    “Seems to be a bit of a technical fault,” he mumbled. A lump of cast iron smashed into the sand by his feet. “Probably needs to be seen to by a qualified artificer. Probably invalidates the warranty if I mess around—”
    A cracking noise from overhead made him dive for cover, which in this case was a rather surprised sheep. When the racket had died away the windmill’s fan was bowling over through the scrub. As for the rest of it, if there had ever been any user-serviceable parts inside they very clearly weren’t in there any more.
    Rincewind took off his hat to mop his brow, but he wasn’t quick enough. A pink tongue rasped across his forehead like damp sandpaper.
    “Ow! Good grief! You lot really are thirsty, aren’t you…?” He pulled the hat back on, right down to his ears just to be on the safe side. “I could do with a drink myself, to tell the truth…”
    He managed, after pushing a few sheep aside, to find a piece of broken windmill.
    Wading with some difficulty through the press of silent bodies, he made his way to an area that was a little lower than the surrounding scrub, and contained a couple of trees whose leaves looked slightly fresher than the rest.
    “Ow! G’d gr’f!” chattered the birds around him.
    Two or three feet should do it, he thought as he shoveled the red soil aside. Amazing, really, all this water underground when it never rained at all. The whole place must be floating on water.
    At three feet down the soil was barely damp. He sighed, and kept going.
    He was more than chest deep before a trickle oozed out between his toes. The sheep fought for the damp soil as he threw it up to the surface. As he watched, the puddle sank into the ground.
    “Hey, come back!”
    “H’y, c’m bik!” screamed the birds in the bushes.
    “Shut up!”
    “Sh’tup! Wh’spr’boyden?”
    He flailed at the ground with his makeshift shovel in an effort to catch up, and overtook the descending water after another few inches. He splashed on until he was knee deep, dragged his hat through the muddy liquid, pulled himself out of the hole and ran, water dribbling over his feet, until he could tip it into the trough.
    The sheep clustered around it, struggling silently to get at the film of moisture.
    Rincewind got two more hatfuls before the water sank out of sight.
    He wrenched the ladder off the stricken windmill, threw it down the hole and jumped in after it. Damp soil fountained out as he dug, and each dripping lump attracted a mass of flies and small birds as soon as it hit the ground.
    He managed another dozen or so hatfuls before the hole was deeper than the ladder.