The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett [2]
The room was silent as she scrabbled in her box of pieces and, from the very bottom, produced a couple that she set down on the board with two decisive clicks. The rest of the players, as one god, craned forward to peer at them.
“A wenegade wiffard and fome fort of clerk,” said Offler the Crocodile God, hindered as usual by his tusks. “Well, weally!” With one claw he pushed a pile of bone-white tokens into the center of the table.
The Lady nodded slightly. She picked up the dice cup and held it as steady as a rock, yet all the gods could hear the three cubes rattling about inside. And then she sent them bouncing across the table.
A six. A three. A five.
Something was happening to the five, however. Battered by the chance collision of several billion molecules, the die flipped onto a point, spun gently and came down a seven.
Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides.
“Come on,” he said wearily. “Play fair.”
1
THE COLOR OF MAGIC
Fire roared through the bifurcated city of Ankh-Morpork. Where it licked the Wizards’ Quarter it burned blue and green and was even laced with strange sparks of the eighth color, octarine; where its outriders found their way into the vats and oil stores all along Merchant Street it progressed in a series of blazing fountains and explosions; in the streets of the perfume blenders it burned with a sweetness; where it touched bundles of rare and dry herbs in the storerooms of the drugmasters it made men go mad and talk to God.
By now the whole of downtown Morpork was alight, and the richer and worthier citizens of Ankh on the far bank were bravely responding to the situation by feverishly demolishing the bridges. But already the ships in the Morpork docks—laden with grain, cotton and timber, and coated with tar—were blazing merrily and, their moorings burnt to ashes, were breasting the river Ankh on the ebb tide, igniting riverside palaces and bowers as they drifted like drowning fireflies toward the sea. In any case, sparks were riding the breeze and touching down far across the river in hidden gardens and remote rickyards.
The smoke from the merry burning rose miles high, in a wind-sculpted black column that could be seen across the whole of the Discworld.
It was certainly impressive from the cool, dark hilltop a few leagues away, where two figures were watching with considerable interest.
The taller of the pair was chewing on a chicken leg and leaning on a sword that was only marginally shorter than the average man. If it wasn’t for the air of wary intelligence about him it might have been supposed that he was a barbarian from the Hubland wastes.
His partner was much shorter and wrapped from head to toe in a brown cloak. Later, when he has occasion to move, it will be seen that he moves lightly, catlike.
The two had barely exchanged a word in the last twenty minutes except for a short and inconclusive argument as to whether a particularly powerful explosion had been the oil bond store or the workshop of Kerible the Enchanter. Money hinged on the fact.
Now the big man finished gnawing at the bone and tossed it into the grass, smiling ruefully.
“There go all those little alleyways,” he said. “I liked them.”
“All the treasure houses,” said the small man. He added thoughtfully, “Do gems burn? I wonder. ’Tis said they’re kin to coal.”
“All the gold, melting and running down the gutters,” said the big one, ignoring him. “And all the wine, boiling in the barrels.”
“There were rats,” said his brown companion.
“Rats, I’ll grant you.”
“It was no place to be in high summer.”
“That, too. One can’t help feeling, though, a—well, a momentary—”
He trailed off, then brightened. “We owed old Fredor at the Crimson Leech eight silver pieces,” he added. The little man nodded.
They were silent for a while as a whole new series of explosions carved a red line across a hitherto dark section of the greatest city in the world. Then the big man stirred.
“Weasel?”
“Yes?”
“I wonder who started it.”
The small swordsman known as