Pyramids - Terry Pratchett [10]
“Yes, sir,” he said. This didn’t seem like enough, in the circumstances. He added, “Thank you, sir.”
He’d always remember the first night in the dormitory. It was long enough to accommodate all eighteen boys in Viper House, and drafty enough to accommodate the great outdoors. Its designer may have had comfort in mind, but only so that he could avoid it wherever possible: he had contrived a room that could actually be colder than the weather outside.
“I thought we got rooms to ourselves,” said Teppic.
Chidder, who had laid claim to the least exposed bed in the whole refrigerator, nodded at him.
“Later on,” he said. He lay back, and winced. “Do they sharpen these springs, do you reckon?”
Teppic said nothing. The bed was in fact rather more comfortable than the one he’d slept in at home. His parents, being high born, naturally tolerated conditions for their children which would have been rejected out of hand by destitute sandflies.
He stretched out on the thin mattress and analyzed the day’s events. He’d been enrolled as an assassin, all right, a student assassin, for more than seven hours and they hadn’t even let him lay a hand on a knife yet. Of course, tomorrow was another day…
Chidder leaned over.
“Where’s Arthur?” he said.
Teppic looked at the bed opposite him. There was a pathetically small sack of clothing positioned neatly in its center, but no sign of its intended occupant.
“Do you think he’s run away?” he said, staring around at the shadows.
“Could be,” said Chidder. “It happens a lot, you know. Mummy’s boys, away from home for the first time—”
The door at the end of the room swung open slowly and Arthur entered, backward, tugging a large and very reluctant billy goat. It fought him every step of the way down the aisle between the bedsteads.
The boys watched in silence for several minutes as he tethered the animal to the end of his bed, upended the sack on the blankets, and took out several black candles, a sprig of herbs, a rope of skulls, and a piece of chalk. Taking the chalk, and adopting the shiny, pink-faced expression of someone who is going to do what they know to be right no matter what, Arthur drew a double circle around his bed and then, getting down on his chubby knees, filled the space between them with as unpleasant a collection of occult symbols as Teppic had ever seen. When they were completed to his satisfaction he placed the candles at strategic points and lit them; they spluttered and gave off a smell that suggested that you really wouldn’t want to know what they were made of.
He drew a short, red-handled knife from the jumble on the bed and advanced toward the goat—
A pillow hit him on the back of the head.
“Garn! Pious little bastard!”
Arthur dropped the knife and burst into tears. Chidder sat up in bed.
“That was you, Cheesewright!” he said. “I saw you!”
Cheesewright, a skinny young man with red hair and a face that was one large freckle, glared at him.
“Well, it’s too much,” he said. “A fellow can’t sleep with all this religion going on. I mean, only little kids say their prayers at bedtime these days, we’re supposed to be learning to be assassins—”
“You can jolly well shut up, Cheesewright,” shouted Chidder. “It’d be a better world if more people said their prayers, you know. I know I don’t say mine as often as I should—”
A pillow cut him off in mid-sentence. He bounded out of bed and vaulted at the red-haired boy, fists flailing.
As the rest of the dormitory gathered around the scuffling pair Teppic slid out of bed and padded over to Arthur, who was sitting on the edge of his bed and sobbing.
He patted him uncertainly on the shoulder, on the basis that this sort of thing was supposed to reassure people.
“I shouldn’t cry about it, youngster,” he said, gruffly.
“But—but all the runes have been scuffed,” said Arthur. “It’s all too late now! And that means the Great Orm will come in the night and wind out my entrails on a stick!”
“Does it?”
“And suck out my eyes, my mother said!”
“Gosh!” said Teppic, fascinated. “Really?” He was quite glad his bed was