Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [24]
The Archchancellor disentangled himself from the remains of his chair.
“Bursar!” he yelled.
The Bursar was exhumed from the fireplace.
“Um, yes, Archchancellor?” he quavered.
“What was the meanin’ of that?”
Ridcully’s hat rose from his head.
It was a basic floppy-brimmed, pointy wizarding hat, but adapted to the Archchancellor’s outgoing lifestyle. Fishing flies were stuck in it. A very small pistol crossbow was shoved in the hatband in case he saw something to shoot while out jogging, and Mustrum Ridcully had found that the pointy bit was just the right size for a small bottle of Bentinck’s Very Old Peculiar Brandy. He was quite attached to his hat.
But it was no longer attached to him.
It drifted gently across the room. There was a faint but distinct gurgling noise.
The Archchancellor leapt to his feet. “Bugger that,” he roared. “That stuff’s nine dollars a fifth!” He made a leap for the hat, missed, and kept on going until he drifted to a halt several feet above the ground.
The Bursar raised a hand, nervously.
“Possibly woodworm?” he said.
“If there is any more of this,” growled Ridcully, “any more at all, d’you hear, I shall get very angry!”
He was dropped to the floor at the same time as the big doors opened. One of the college porters bustled in, followed by a squad of the Patrician’s palace guard.
The guard captain looked the Archchancellor up and down with the expression of one to whom the word “civilian” is pronounced in the same general tones as “cockroach.”
“You the head chap?” he said.
The Archchancellor smoothed his robe and tried to straighten his beard.
“I am the Archchancellor of this university, yes,” he said.
The guard captain looked curiously around the hall. The students were all cowering down the far end. Splashed food covered most of the walls to ceiling height. Bits of furniture lay around the wreckage of the chandelier like trees around ground zero of a meteor strike.
Then he spoke with all the distaste of someone whose own further education had stopped at age nine, but who’d heard stories…
“Indulging in a bit of youthful high spirits, were we?” he said. “Throwin’ a few bread rolls around that kind of thing?”
“May I ask the meaning of this intrusion?” said Ridcully, coldly.
The guard captain leaned on his spear.
“Well,” he said, “it’s like this. The Patrician is barricaded in his bedroom on account of the furniture in the palace is zooming around the place like you wouldn’t believe, the cooks won’t even go back in the kitchen on account of what’s happening in there…”
The wizards tried not to look at the spear’s head. It was starting to unscrew itself.
“Anyway,” the captain went on, oblivious to the faint metallic noises, “the Patrician calls through the keyhole, see, and says to me, ‘Douglas, I wonder if you wouldn’t mind nipping down to the University and asking the head man if he would be so good as to step up here, if he’s not too busy?’ But I can always go back and tell him you’re engagin’ in a bit of student humor, if you like.”
The spearhead was almost off the shaft.
“You listening to me?” said the captain suspiciously.
“Hmm? What?” said the Archchancellor, tearing his eyes away from the spinning metal. “Oh. Yes. Well, I can assure you, my man, that we are not the cause of—”
“Aargh!”
“Pardon?”
“The spearhead fell on my foot!”
“Did it?” said Ridcully, innocently.
The guard captain hopped up and down.
“Listen, are you bloody hocus-pocus merchants coming or not?” he said, between bounces. “The boss is not very happy. Not very happy at all.”
A great formless cloud of Life drifted across the Discworld, like water building up behind a dam when the sluice gates are shut. With no Death to take the life force away when it was finished with, it had nowhere else to go.
Here and there it earthed itself in random poltergeist activity, like flickers of summer lightning before a big storm.
Everything that exists, yearns