The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett [8]
He knelt down in the leafmold and peered under the cap. After a while he said weakly, “No, no good to eat at all.”
“Why?” called Twoflower. “Are the gills the wrong shade of yellow?”
“No, not really…”
“I expect the stems haven’t got the right kind of fluting, then.”
“They look okay, actually.”
“The cap, then, I expect the cap is the wrong color,” said Twoflower.
“Not sure about that.”
“Well then, why can’t you eat them?”
Rincewind coughed. “It’s the little doors and windows,” he said wretchedly, “it’s a dead giveaway.”
Thunder rolled across Unseen University. Rain poured over its roofs and gurgled out of its gargoyles, although one or two of the more cunning ones had scuttled off to shelter among the maze of tiles.
Far below, in the Great Hall, the eight most powerful wizards on the Discworld gathered at the angles of a ceremonial octogram. Actually they probably weren’t the most powerful, if the truth were known, but they certainly had great powers of survival which, in the highly competitive world of magic, was pretty much the same thing. Behind every wizard of the eighth rank were half a dozen seventh rank wizards trying to bump him off, and senior wizards had to develop an inquiring attitude to, for example, scorpions in their bed. An ancient proverb summed it up: When a wizard is tired of looking for broken glass in his dinner, it ran, he is tired of life.
The oldest wizard, Greyhald Spold of the Ancient and Truly Original Sages of the Unbroken Circle, leaned heavily on his carven staff and spake thusly:
“Get on with it, Weatherwax, my feet are giving me gyp.”
Galder, who had merely paused for effect, glared at him.
“Very well, then, I will be brief—”
“Jolly good.”
“We all sought guidance as to the events of this morning. Can anyone among us say he received it?”
The wizards looked sidelong at one another. Nowhere outside a trades union conference fraternal benefit night can so much mutual distrust and suspicion be found as among a gathering of senior enchanters. But the plain fact was that the day had gone very badly. Normally informative demons, summoned abruptly from the Dungeon Dimensions, had looked sheepish and sidled away when questioned. Magic mirrors had cracked. Tarot cards had mysteriously become blank. Crystal balls had gone all cloudy. Even tea leaves, normally scorned by wizards as frivolous and unworthy of contemplation, had clustered together at the bottom of cups and refused to move.
In short, the assembled wizards were at a loss. There was a general murmur of agreement.
“And therefore I propose that we perform the Rite of AshkEnte,” said Galder dramatically.
He had to admit that he had hoped for a better response, something on the lines of, well, “No, not the Rite of AshkEnte! Man was not meant to meddle with such things!”
In fact there was a general mutter of approval.
“Good idea.”
“Seems reasonable.”
“Get on with it, then.”
Slightly put out, he summoned a procession of lesser wizards who carried various magical implements into the hall.
It has already been hinted that around this time there was some disagreement among the fraternity of wizards about how to practice magic.
Younger wizards in particular went about saying that it was time that magic started to update its image and that they should all stop mucking about with bits of wax and bone and put the whole thing on a properly organized basis, with research programs and three-day conventions in good hotels where they could read papers with titles like “Whither Geomancy?” and “The Role of Seven-League Boots in a Caring Society.”
Trymon, for example, hardly ever did any magic these days but ran the Order with hourglass efficiency and wrote lots of memos and had a big chart on his office wall, covered with colored blobs and flags and lines that no one else really understood but which looked very impressive.
The other type of wizard thought all this was so much marsh gas and wouldn’t have anything to do with an image unless it was made of wax and had pins stuck in it.