Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett [3]
“Have what?” said Throat.
“It. At least, I had it. Octo-cellulose. Amazing stuff. Had it in my hand. But I held it too close to the fire,” said the figure, in the perplexed tones of the nearly concussed. “V’ry important fact. Mus’ make a note of it. Don’t let it get hot. V’ry important. Mus’ write down v’ry important fact.”
He tottered back into the smoking ruins.
Dibbler watched him go.
“Wonder what that was all about?” he said. Then he shrugged and raised his voice to a shout. “Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h’an’t noticed they’re gone!”
The glittering, swirling idea from the hill had watched all this. The alchemist didn’t even know it was there. All he knew was that he was being unusually inventive today.
Now it had spotted the pie merchant’s mind.
It knew that kind of mind. It loved minds like that. A mind that could sell nightmare pies could sell dreams.
It leaped.
On a hill far away the breeze stirred the cold, gray ash.
Further down the hill, in a crack in a hollow between two rocks where a dwarf juniper bush struggled for a living, a little trickle of sand began to move.
Boom.
A fine film of plaster dust drifted down onto the desk of Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor of Unseen University, just as he was trying to tie a particularly difficult fly.
He glanced out of the stained-glass window. A smoke cloud was rising over uptown Morpork.
“Bursaar!”
The Bursar arrived within a few seconds, out of breath. Loud noises always upset him.
“It’s the alchemists, Master,” he panted.
“That’s the third time this week. Blasted firework merchants,” muttered the Archchancellor.
“I’m afraid so, Master,” said the Bursar.
“What do they think they’re doing?”
“I really couldn’t say, Master,” said the Bursar, getting his breath back. “Alchemy has never interested me. It’s altogether too…too…”
“Dangerous,” said the Archchancellor firmly. “Lot of damn mixin’ things up and saying, hey, what’ll happen if we add a drop of the yellow stuff, and then goin’ around without yer eyebrows for a fortnight.”
“I was going to say impractical,” said the Bursar. “Trying to do things the hard way when we have perfectly simple everyday magic available.”
“I thought they were trying to cure the philosopher’s stones, or somethin’,” said the Archchancellor. “Lot of damn nonsense, if you ask me. Anyway, I’m off.”
As the Archchancellor began to sidle out of the room the Bursar hastily waved a handful of papers at him.
“Before you go, Archchancellor,” he said desperately, “I wonder if you would just care to sign a few—”
“Not now, man,” snapped the Archchancellor. “Got to see a man about a horse, what?”
“What?”
“Right.” The door closed.
The Bursar stared at it, and sighed.
Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones—they’d come, they’d served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they’d died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.
However, from the Bursar’s point of view this didn’t really have to matter. The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor and the Archchancellor’s most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar’s point of view, without reading them first.
This one was different. For one thing, he was hardly ever in, except to change out of his muddy clothes. And he shouted at people. Usually at the Bursar.
And yet, at the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn’t set foot in the University in forty years.
There had been so much in-fighting between the various orders of wizardry in recent years that, just for once, the senior wizards had agreed that what the University needed was a period of stability, so that they could get on with their scheming and intriguing in peace and quiet