The Light Fantastic

Funny how the old place seemed more attractive the farther he got from it. He only had to close his eyes to picture, in dribbling detail, the food stalls of a hundred different cultures in the market places. You could eat squishi or shark’s fin soup so fresh that swimmers wouldn’t go near it, and—
    “Do you think I could buy this place?” said Twoflower. Rincewind hesitated. He’d found it always paid to think very carefully before answering Twoflower’s more surprising questions.
    “What for?” he said, cautiously.
    “Well, it just reeks of ambience.”
    “Oh.”
    “What’s ambience?” said Swires, sniffing cautiously and wearing the kind of expression that said that he hadn’t done it, whatever it was.
    “I think it’s a kind of frog,” said Rincewind. “Anyway, you can’t buy this place because there isn’t anyone to buy it from —”
    “I think I could probably arrange that, on behalf of the forest council of course,” interrupted Swires, trying to avoid Rincewind’s glare.
    “—and anyway you couldn’t take it with you, I mean, you could hardly pack it in the Luggage, could you?” Rincewind indicated the Luggage, which was lying by the fire and managing in some quite impossible way to look like a contented but alert tiger, and then looked back at Twoflower. His face fell.
    “Could you?” he repeated.
    He had never quite come to terms with the fact that the inside of the Luggage didn’t seem to inhabit quite the same world as the outside. Of course, this was simply a byproduct of its essential weirdness, but it was disconcerting to see Twoflower fill it full of dirty shirts and old socks and then open the lid again on a pile of nice crisp laundry, smelling faintly of lavender. Twoflower also bought a lot of quaint native artifacts or, as Rincewind would put it, junk, and even a seven-foot ceremonial pig tickling pole seemed to fit inside quite easily without sticking out anywhere.
    “I don’t know,” said Twoflower. “You’re a wizard, you know about these things.”
    “Yes, well, of course, but baggage magic is a highly specialized art,” said Rincewind. “Anyway, I’m sure the gnomes wouldn’t really want to sell it, it’s, it’s—” he groped through what he knew of Twoflower’s mad vocabulary—“it’s a tourist attraction.”
    “What’s that?” said Swires, interestedly.
    “It means that lots of people like him will come and look at it,” said Rincewind.
    “Why?”
    “Because—” Rincewind groped for words “—it’s quaint. Um, oldey worldey. Folkloresque. Er, a delightful example of a vanished folk art, steeped in the traditions of an age long gone.”
    “It is?” said Swires, looking at the cottage in bewilderment.
    “Yes.”
    “All that?”
    “’Fraid so.”
    “I’ll help you pack.”
    And the night wears on, under a blanket of lowering clouds which covers most of the Disc—which is fortuitous, because when it clears and the astrologers get a good view of the sky they are going to get angry and upset.
    And in various parts of the forest parties of wizards are getting lost, and going around in circles, and hiding from each other, and getting upset because whenever they bump into a tree it apologizes to them. But, unsteadily though it may be, many of them are getting quite close to the cottage…
    Which is a good time to get back to the rambling buildings of Unseen University and in particular the apartments of Greyhald Spold, currently the oldest wizard on the Disc and determined to keep it that way.
    He has just been extremely surprised and upset.
    For the last few hours he has been very busy. He may be deaf and a little hard of thinking, but elderly wizards have very well-trained survival instincts, and they know that when a tall figure in a black robe and the latest in agricultural hand tools starts looking thoughtfully at you it is time to act fast. The servants have been dismissed. The doorways have been sealed with a paste made from powdered mayflies, and protective octograms have been drawn on the windows. Rare and rather smelly oils have been poured in complex patterns on the floor, in designs which hurt the eyes and suggest the designer was drunk or from some other dimension or, possibly, both; in the very center of the room is the eightfold octogram of Witholding, surrounded by red and green candles. And in the center of that is a box made from wood of the curlyfern pine, which grows to a great age, and it is lined with red