The Last Continent

with borrowed money and you’d have a full house. They ain’t gonna kill you in a hurry.”
    “That’s not much comfort! Anyway, I didn’t do any of that stuff—Well, I mean I did , but—”
    “It’s what people think that matters. Now they believe you waltzed out of a locked cell.”
    “All I did was—”
    “Doesn’t matter! The number of gaolers who want to shake you by the hand, well, I reckon they wouldn’t get around to hanging you by lunchtime!”
    “Listen, you giant jumping rat, I’ve made it to the docks, okay? I can outrun them! I can lie low! I know how to stow away, throw up, get discovered, be thrown over the side, stay afloat for two days by clinging on to an old barrel and eating plankton sieved through my beard, carefully negotiate the treacherous coral reef surrounding an atoll and survive by eating yams!”
    “That’s a very special talent you got there,” said the kangaroo, bounding over a ship’s hawser. “How many Ecksian ships have you ever seen in Ankh-Morpork? Busiest port in the world, ain’t it?”
    Rincewind slowed. “Well…”
    “It’s the currents, mate. Get more’n ten miles off’f the coast here and there ain’t one captain in a hundred who can stop his ship going right over the Rim. They stick very close inshore.”
    Rincewind stopped. “You mean this whole place is a prison? ”
    “Yep. But the Ecksians say this is the best bloody place in the world, so there’s no point in going anywhere else anyway.”
    There were shouts behind him. The guards here didn’t take so long counting to ten as most guards did.
    “What’re you going to do now?” said Rincewind.
    The kangaroo had gone.
    He ducked down a side street and found his way completely blocked. Carts filled the street from edge to edge. Gaily decorated carts.
    Rincewind paused. He had always been the foremost exponent of the from rather than the to of running. He could have written “The From of Running.” But just occasionally a certain subtle sense told him that the to was important.
    For one thing, a lot of the people standing and chatting around the carts were wearing leather.
    You could make a lot of arguments in favor of leather. It was long-lasting, practical and hard-wearing. People like Cohen the Barbarian found it so hard-wearing and long-lasting that their old loincloths had to be removed by a blacksmith. But the people here didn’t look as if these were the qualities that they’d been looking for in the boutique. They’d asked questions like: How many studs has it got? How shiny is it? Has it got holes cut out in unusual places?
    But still, one of the most basic rules for survival on any planet is never to upset someone wearing black leather. * Rincewind sidled politely past them, giving them a friendly nod and a wave whenever he saw one looking in his direction. For some reason, this caused more of them to take an interest in him.
    There were groups of ladies, too, and there was no doubt that if EcksEcksEcksEcks was where a man could stand tall, so could a woman. Some of them were nevertheless very pretty, in an overstated kind of way, although the occasional moustache looked out of place, but Rincewind had been to foreign parts and knew that things could be a bit lush in the more rural regions.
    There were more sequins than you usually saw. More feathers, too.
    Then it dawned on him in a great rush of relief.
    “Oh, this is a carnival , right?” he said aloud. “This is the Galah they keep talking about.”
    “Pardon you?” said a lady in a spangly blue dress, who was changing the wheel on a large purple cart.
    “These are carnival floats, aren’t they?” said Rincewind.
    The woman gritted her teeth, rammed the new wheel into place and then released the axle. The cart bounced down on to the cobbles.
    “Damn, I think I broke a nail on that,” she said. She glanced at Rincewind. “Yeah, this is the carnival. That dress has seen better days, hasn’t it? Nice moustache, shame about the beard. It’d look good with a tint.”
    Rincewind glanced back down the street. The floats and the press of people were hiding him from view, but this wouldn’t last long.
    “Er…could you help me, madam?” he said. “Er…the Watch are after me.”
    “They can be so tiresome like that.”
    “There was a misunderstanding over a sheep.”
    “There so often is, mate.” She looked Rincewind up and down. “You don’t look like a country boy, I must say.”
    “Me? I get nervous