The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett [107]
And now when you looked at it you could hear the wind in the branches.
The old man reached down beside him and took up a flat stone with some white paste on it. He drew another line on the rock, slightly like a flattened V, and smeared it with mud.
The Bursar burst out laughing as the wings emerged from the painting and whirred past him.
And again he was aware of a strange effect in the air. It reminded him of…yes…old “Rubber” Houser, that was his name, dead now, of course, but remembered by many of his contemporaries as the inventor of the Graphical Device.
The Bursar had joined the University when likely wizards started their training early, somewhere after the point where they learned to walk but before they started to push over girls in the playground. The writing of lines in detention class was a familiar punishment and the Bursar, like everyone else, toyed with the usual practice of tying several pens to a ruler in a group attempt to write lines in threes. But Houser, a reflective sort of boy, had scrounged some bits of wood and stripped a mattress of its springs and devised the four-, sixteen-and eventually the thirty-two-line writing machine. It had got so popular that boys were actually breaking rules in order to have a go on it, at threepence a time to use it and a penny to help wind it up. Of course, more time was spent setting it up than was ever saved by using it, but this is the case in many similar fields and is a sign of Progress. The experiments tragically came to an end when someone opened a door at the wrong moment and the entire pent-up force of Houser’s experimental prototype 256-line machine propelled him backwards out of a fourth-floor window.
Except for the absence of screams, the hand tracing its infinitely simple lines on the rock brought back memories of Houser. There was a sense of something small being done that was making something happen that was huge.
He sat and watched. It was, he remembered later whenever he was in a state to remember anything, one of the happiest times of his life.
When Rincewind lifted his head a watchman’s helmet was spinning gently on the ground.
To his amazement the men themselves were still there, although they were lying around in various attitudes of unconsciousness or at least, if they had sense, feigned unconsciousness. The Luggage had a cat’s tendency to lose interest in things that didn’t fight back even after you’d kicked them a few times.
Shoes littered the ground, too. The Luggage was limping around in a circle.
Rincewind sighed, and stood up. “Take the shoes off. They don’t suit you,” he said.
The Luggage stood still for a moment, and then the rest of the shoes clattered against the wall.
“And the dress. What would those nice ladies think if they saw you dressing up like this?”
The Luggage shrugged off the few sequined tatters that remained.
“Turn around, I want to see your handles. No, I said turn around. Turn around properly, please. Ah, I thought so…I said turn around. Those earrings…they don’t do anything for you at all, you know.” He leaned closer. “Is that a stud? Have you had your lid pierced?”
The Luggage backed away. Its manner indicated very clearly that while it might give in on the shoes, the dress and even the earrings, the battle over the stud would go to the finish.
“Well…all right. Now give me my clean underwear, you could make shelves out of the stuff I’m wearing.”
The Luggage opened its lid.
“Good, now I—Is that my underwear? Would I be seen dead in something like that? Yes, as a matter of fact I suspect I would. My underwear, please. It’s got my name inside, although I must admit I can’t quite remember why I thought that was necessary.”
The lid shut. The lid opened.
“Thank you.”
It was no use wondering how it was done, or for that matter why the laundry returned freshly ironed.
The watchmen were still very wisely remaining unconscious, but out of habit Rincewind went behind a stack of old boxes