The Light Fantastic

of eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight steps. From its crenellated roof, the haunt of ravens and disconcertingly alert gargoyles, a wizard might see to the very edge of the Disc. After spending ten minutes or so coughing horribly, of course.
    “Sod that,” he muttered. “What’s the good of being a wizard, after all? Avyento, thessalous! I would fly! To me, spirits of air and darkness!”
    He spread a gnarled hand and pointed to a piece of crumbling parapet. Octarine fire sprouted from under his nicotine-stained nails and burst against the rotting stone far above.
    It fell. By a finely calculated exchange of velocities Galder rose, nightshirt flapping around his bony legs. Higher and higher he soared, hurtling through the pale light like a, like a—all right, like an elderly but powerful wizard being propelled upward by an expertly judged thumb on the scales of the universe.
    He landed in a litter of old nests, caught his balance, and stared down at the vertiginous view of a Disc dawn.
    At this time of the long year the Circle Sea was almost on the sunset side of Cori Celesti, and as the daylight sloshed down into the lands around Ankh-Morpork the shadow of the mountain scythed across the landscape like the gnomon of God’s sundial. But nightward, racing the slow light toward the edge of the world, a line of white mist surged on.
    There was a crackling of dry twigs behind him. He turned to see Ymper Trymon, second in command of the Order, who had been the only other wizard able to keep up.
    Galder ignored him for the moment, taking care only to keep a firm grip on the stonework and strengthen his personal spells of protection. Promotion was slow in a profession that traditionally bestowed long life, and it was accepted that younger wizards would frequently seek advancement via dead men’s curly shoes, having previously emptied them of their occupants. Besides, there was something disquieting about young Trymon. He didn’t smoke, only drank boiled water, and Galder had the nasty suspicion that he was clever. He didn’t smile often enough, and he liked figures and the sort of organization charts that show lots of squares with arrows pointing to other squares. In short, he was the sort of man who could use the word “personnel” and mean it.
    The whole of the visible Disc was now covered with a shimmering white skin that fitted it perfectly.
    Galder looked down at his own hands and saw them covered with a pale network of shining threads that followed every movement.
    He recognized this kind of spell. He’d used them himself. But his had been smaller—much smaller.
    “It’s a Change spell,” said Trymon. “The whole world is being changed.”
    Some people, thought Galder grimly, would have had the decency to put an exclamation mark on the end of a statement like that.
    There was the faintest of pure sounds, high and sharp, like the breaking of a mouse’s heart.
    “What was that?” he said.
    Trymon cocked his head.
    “C-sharp, I think,” he said.
    Galder said nothing. The white shimmer had vanished, and the first sounds of the waking city began to filter up to the two wizards. Everything seemed exactly the same as it had before. All that, just to make things stay the same?
    He patted his nightshirt pockets distractedly and finally found what he was looking for lodged behind his ear. He put the soggy dogend in his mouth, called up mystical fire from between his fingers, and dragged hard on the wretched rollup until little blue lights flashed in front of his eyes. He coughed once or twice.
    He was thinking very hard indeed.
    He was trying to remember if any gods owed him any favors.

    In fact the Gods were as puzzled by all this as the wizards were, but they were powerless to do anything and in any case were engaged in an eons-old battle with the Ice Giants, who had refused to return the lawnmower.
    But some clue as to what actually had happened might be found in the fact that Rincewind, whose past life had just got up to a quite interesting bit when he was fifteen, suddenly found himself not dying after all but hanging upside down in a pine tree.
    He got down easily by dropping uncontrollably from branch to branch until he landed on his head in a pile of pine needles, where he lay gasping for breath and wishing he’d been a better person.
    Somewhere, he knew, there had to be a perfectly logical connection. One minute one happens to be dying, having dropped off the rim of the world, and the