The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett [25]
“All right,” said Gancia softly.
He looked back at the unheeding men around the fire, who seemed to be shouting at someone outside the cave. Then he looked speculatively at Weems. His lips moved soundlessly with the unaccustomed effort of mental arithmetic.
He looked down at his knife.
Then the floor moved.
“I heard someone,” said one of the men. “Down there. Among the—uh—rocks.”
Rincewind’s voice floated up out of the darkness.
“I say,” he said.
“Well?” said Herrena.
“You’re in great danger!” shouted Rincewind. “You must put the fire out!”
“No, no,” said Herrena. “You’ve got it wrong, you’re in great danger. And the fire stays.”
“There’s this big old troll—”
“Everyone knows trolls keep away from fire,” said Herrena. She nodded. A couple of men drew their swords and slipped out into the darkness.
“Absolutely true!” shouted Rincewind desperately. “Only this specific troll can’t, you see.”
“Can’t?” Herrena hesitated. Something of the terror in Rincewind’s voice hit her.
“Yes, because, you see, you’ve lit it on his tongue.”
Then the floor moved.
Old Grandad awoke very slowly from his centuries-old slumber. He nearly didn’t awake at all, in fact a few decades later none of this could have happened. When a troll gets old and starts to think seriously about the universe it normally finds a quiet spot and gets down to some hard philosophizing, and after a while starts to forget about its extremities. It begins to crystallize around the edges until nothing remains except a tiny flicker of life inside quite a large hill with some unusual rock strata.
Old Grandad hadn’t quite got that far. He awoke from considering quite a promising line of inquiry about the meaning of truth and found a hot ashy taste in what, after a certain amount of thought, he remembered as being his mouth.
He began to get angry. Commands skittered along neural pathways of impure silicon. Deep within his silicaceous body stone slipped smoothly along special fracture lines. Trees toppled, turf split, as fingers the size of ships unfolded and gripped the ground. Two enormous rockslides high on his cliff face marked the opening of eyes like great crusted opals.
Rincewind couldn’t see all this, of course, since his own eyes were daylight issue only, but he did see the whole dark landscape shake itself slowly and then begin to rise impossibly against the stars.
The sun rose.
However, the sunlight didn’t. What did happen was that the famous Discworld sunlight, which as has already been indicated travels very slowly through the Disc’s powerful magical field, sloshed gently over the lands around the Rim and began its soft, silent battle against the retreating armies of the night. It poured like molten gold* across the sleeping landscape—bright, clean and, above all, slow.
Herrena didn’t hesitate. With great presence of mind she ran to the edge of Old Grandad’s bottom lip and jumped, rolling as she hit the earth. The men followed her, cursing as they landed among the debris.
Like a fat man trying to do push-ups the old troll pushed himself upward.
This wasn’t apparent from where the prisoners were lying. All they knew was that the floor kept rolling under them and that there was a lot of noise going on, most of it unpleasant.
Weems grabbed Gancia’s arm.
“It’s a herthquake,” he said. “Let’s get out of here!”
“Not without that gold,” said Gancia.
“What?”
“The gold, the gold. Man, we could be as rich as Creosote!”
Weems might have had a room-temperature IQ, but he knew idiocy when he saw it. Gancia’s eyes gleamed more than gold, and he appeared to be staring at Weems’s left ear.
Weems looked desperately at the Luggage. It was still open invitingly, which was odd—you’d have thought all this shaking would have slammed the lid shut.
“We’d never carry it,” he suggested. “It’s too heavy,” he added.
“We’ll damn well carry some of it!” shouted Gancia, and leapt toward the chest as the floor shook again.
The lid snapped shut. Gancia vanished.
And just in case Weems thought it was accidental the Luggage’s lid snapped