Sourcery - Terry Pratchett [82]
Towards where the Library had been.
There was the arch of the doorway, and most of the walls were still standing, but a lot of the roof had fallen in and everything was blackened by soot.
Rincewind stood and stared for a long time.
Then he dropped the carpet and ran, stumbling and sliding through the rubble that half-blocked the doorway. The stones were still warm underfoot. Here and there the wreckage of a bookcase still smouldered.
Anyone watching would have seen Rincewind dart backward and forward across the shimmering heaps, scrabbling desperately among them, throwing aside charred furniture, pulling aside lumps of fallen roof with less than superhuman strength.
They would have seen him pause once or twice to get his breath back, then dive in again, cutting his hands on shards of half-molten glass from the dome of the roof. They would have noticed that he seemed to be sobbing.
Eventually his questing fingers touched something warm and soft.
The frantic wizard heaved a charred roof beam aside, scrabbled through a drift of fallen tiles and peered down.
There, half squashed by the beam and baked brown by the fire, was a large bunch of overripe, squashy bananas.
He picked one up, very carefully, and sat and watched it for some time until the end fell off.
Then he ate it.
“We shouldn’t have let him go like that,” said Conina.
“How could we have stopped him, oh, beauteous doe-eyed eaglet?”
“But he may do something stupid!”
“I should think that is very likely,” said Creosote primly.
“While we do something clever and sit on a baking beach with nothing to eat or drink, is that it?”
“You could tell me a story,” said Creosote, trembling slightly.
“Shut up.”
The Seriph ran his tongue over his lips.
“I suppose a quick anecdote is out of the question?” he croaked.
Conina sighed. “There’s more to life than narrative, you know.”
“Sorry. I lost control a little, there.”
Now that the sun was well up the crushed-shell beach glowed like a salt flat. The sea didn’t look any better by daylight. It moved like thin oil.
Away on either side the beach stretched in long, excruciatingly flat curves, supporting nothing but a few clumps of withered dune grass which lived off the moisture in the spray. There was no sign of any shade.
“The way I see it,” said Conina, “this is a beach, and that means sooner or later we’ll come to a river, so all we have to do is keep walking in one direction.”
“And yet, delightful snow on the slopes of Mount Eritor, we do not know which one.”
Nijel sighed, and reached into his bag.
“Erm,” he said, “excuse me. Would this be any good? I stole it. Sorry.”
He held out the lamp that had been in the treasury.
“It’s magic, isn’t it?” he said hopefully. “I’ve heard about them, isn’t it worth a try?”
Creosote shook his head.
“But you said your grandfather used it to make his fortune!” said Conina.
‘A lamp,” said the Seriph, “he used a lamp. Not this lamp. No, the real lamp was a battered old thing, and one day this wicked pedlar came around offering new lamps for old and my great-grandmother gave it to him for this one. The family kept it in the vault as a sort of memorial to her. A truly stupid woman. It doesn’t work, of course.”
“You tried it?”
“No, but he wouldn’t have given it away if it was any good, would he?”
“Give it a rub,” said Conina. “It can’t do any harm.”
“I wouldn’t,” warned Creosote.
Nijel held the lamp gingerly. It had a strangely sleek look, as if someone had set out to make a lamp that could go fast.
He rubbed it.
The effects were curiously unimpressive. There was a half-hearted pop and a puff of wispy smoke near Nijel’s feet. A line appeared in the beach several feet away from the smoke. It spread quickly to outline a square of sand, which vanished.
A figure barrelled out of the beach, jerked to a stop, and groaned.
It was wearing a turban, an expensive tan, a small gold medallion, shiny shorts and advanced running shoes with curly toes.
It said, “I want to get this absolutely straight. Where am I?”
Conina recovered first.
“It’s a beach,”