Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [91]
“I would be remiss in my duty if I failed to help a brother,” said Reg Shoe.
“Oook.”
“You? We can’t take you,” said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. “You don’t know a thing about guerrilla warfare.”
“Oook!” said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn’t know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded up remains of, for example, the Dean.
“Four of us should be enough,” said the Archchancellor.
“I’ve never even heard him say ‘Yo’,” muttered the Dean.
He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn’t ordinarily do unless he’s about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around his forehead.
“It’s part of the ethos,” he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken question. “That’s what the warriors on the Counterweight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout—” He tried to remember some far-off reading—“er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!”
“I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small,” said the Senior Wrangler.
The Dean hesitated. He wasn’t too sure himself, if it came to it. But a good wizard never let uncertainty stand in his way.
“No, it’s definitely got to be bonsai,” he said. He considered it some more and then brightened up. “On account of it all being part of bushido. Like…small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it.”
“But you can’t shout ‘bonsai!’ here,” said the Lecturer of Recent Runes. “We’ve got a totally different cultural background. It’d be useless. No one will know what you mean.”
“I’ll work on it,” said the Dean.
He noticed Ludmilla standing with her mouth open.
“This is wizard talk,” he said.
“It is, isn’t it,” said Ludmilla. “I never would have guessed.”
The Archchancellor had got out of the trolley and was wheeling it experimentally back and forth. It usually took quite a long time for a fresh idea to fully lodge in Ridcully’s mind, but he felt instinctively that there were all sorts of uses for a wire basket on four wheels.
“Are we going or are we standin’ around all night bandagin’ our heads?” he said.
“Yo!” snapped the Dean.
“Yo?” said Reg Shoe.
“Oook!”
“Was that a yo?” said the Dean, suspiciously.
“Oook.”
“Well…all right, then.”
Death sat on a mountaintop. It wasn’t particularly high, or bare, or sinister. No witches held naked sabbats on it; Discworld witches, on the whole, didn’t hold with taking off anymore clothes than was absolutely necessary for the business in hand. No specters haunted it. No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.
Occasionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won’t do.
Death sat on the cairn and ran a stone down the blade of his scythe in long, deliberate strokes.
There was a movement of air. Three gray servants popped into existence.
One said, You think you have won?
One said, You think you have triumphed?
Death turned the stone in his hand, to get a fresh surface, and brought it slowly down the length of the blade.
One said, We will inform Azrael.
One said, You are only, after all, a little Death.
Death held the blade up to the moonlight, twisting it this way and that, noting the play of light on the tiny flecks of metal on its edge.
Then he stood up, in one quick movement. The servants backed away hurriedly.
He reached out with the speed of a snake and grasped a robe, pulling its empty hood level with his eye sockets.
DO YOU KNOW WHY THE PRISONER IN THE TOWER WATCHES THE FLIGHT OF BIRDS? he said.
It said, Take your hands off me…oops…
Blue flame flared for a moment.
Death lowered his hand and looked around at the other two.
One said, You haven’t heard