The Light Fantastic

silk and yet more protective amulets. Because Greyhald Spold knows that Death is looking for him, and has spent many years designing an impregnable hiding place.
    He has just set the complicated clockwork of the lock and shut the lid, lying back in the knowledge that here at last is the perfect defense against the most ultimate of all his enemies, although as yet he has not considered the important part that airholes must play in an enterprise of this kind.
    And right beside him, very close to his ear, a voice has just said: D ARK IN HERE, ISN’T IT ?

    It began to snow. The barleysugar windows of the cottage showed bright and cheerful against the blackness.
    At one side of the clearing three tiny red points of light glowed momentarily and there was the sound of a chesty cough, abruptly silenced.
    “Shut up!” hissed a third rank wizard. “They’ll hear us!”
    “Who will? We gave the lads from the Brotherhood of the Hoodwink the slip in the swamp, and those idiots from the Venerable Council of Seers went off the wrong way anyway.”
    “Yeah,” said the most junior wizard, “but who keeps talking to us? They say this is a magic wood, it’s full of goblins and wolves and—”
    “Trees,” said a voice out of the darkness, high above. It possessed what can only be described as timbre.
    “Yeah,” said the youngest wizard. He sucked on his dogend, and shivered.
    The leader of the party peered over the rock and watched the cottage.
    “Right then,” he said, knocking out his pipe on the heel of his seven-league boot, who squeaked in protest. “We rush in, we grab them, we’re away. Okay?”
    “You sure it’s just people?” said the youngest wizard nervously.
    “Of course I’m sure,” snarled the leader. “What do you expect, three bears?”
    “There could be monsters. This is the sort of wood that has monsters.”
    “And trees,” said a friendly voice from the branches.
    “Yeah,” said the leader, cautiously.

    Rincewind looked carefully at the bed. It was quite a nice little bed, in a sort of hard toffee inlaid with caramel, but he’d rather eat it than sleep in it and it looked as though someone already had.
    “Someone’s been eating my bed,” he said.
    “I like toffee,” said Twoflower defensively.
    “If you don’t watch out the fairy will come and take all your teeth away,” said Rincewind.
    “No, that’s elves,” said Swires from the dressing table. “Elves do that. Toenails, too. Very touchy at times, elves can be.”
    Twoflower sat down heavily on his bed.
    “You’ve got it wrong,” he said. “Elves are noble and beautiful and wise and fair; I’m sure I read that somewhere.”
    Swires and Rincewind’s kneecap exchanged glances.
    “I think you must be thinking about different elves,” the gnome said slowly. “We’ve just got the other sort around here. Not that you could call them quick-tempered,” he added hastily. “Not if you didn’t want to take your teeth home in your hat, anyway.”
    There was the tiny, distinctive sound of a nougat door opening. At the same time, from the other side of the cottage, came the faintest of tinkles, like a rock smashing a barleysugar window as delicately as possible.
    “What was that?” said Twoflower.
    “Which one?” said Rincewind.
    There was the clonk of a heavy branch banging against the windowsill. With a cry of “Elves!” Swires scuttled across the floor to a mouse hole and vanished.
    “What shall we do?” said Twoflower.
    “Panic?” said Rincewind hopefully. He always held that panic was the best means of survival; back in the olden days, his theory went, people faced with hungry saber-toothed tigers could be divided very simply into those who panicked and those who stood there saying “What a magnificent brute!” and “Here, pussy.”
    “There’s a cupboard,” said Twoflower, pointing to a narrow door that was squeezed between the wall and the chimneybreast. They scrambled into sweet, musty darkness.
    There was the creak of a chocolate floorboard outside. Someone said “I heard voices.”
    Someone else said, “Yeah, downstairs. I think it’s the Hoodwinkers.”
    “I thought you said we’d given them the slip!”
    “Hey, you two, you can eat this place! Here, look you can—”
    “Shut up!”
    There was a lot more creaking, and a muffled scream from downstairs where a Venerable Seer, creeping carefully through the darkness from the broken window, had trodden on the fingers of a Hoodwinker who was