Mort - Страница 25

“Yes. Off duty at the moment, though.”

“Pleased to hear it.”

Cutwell shut the door behind them and fumbled for a candlestick. There was a pop, a flash of blue light and a whimper.

“Sorry,” he said, sucking his fingers. “Fire spell. Never really got the hang of it.”

“You were expecting the dome thing, weren’t you?” said Mort urgently. “What will happen when it closes in?”

The wizard sat down heavily on the remains of a bacon sandwich.

“I’m not exactly sure,” he said. “It’ll be interesting to watch. But not from inside, I’m afraid. What I think will happen is that the last week will never have existed.”

“She’ll suddenly die?”

“You don’t quite understand. She will have been dead for a week. All this—” he waved his hands vaguely in the air—“will not have happened. The assassin will have done his job. You will have done yours. History will have healed itself. Everything will be all right. From History’s point of view, that is. There really isn’t any other.”

Mort stared out of the narrow window. He could see across the courtyard into the glowing streets outside, where a picture of the princess smiled at the sky.

“Tell me about the pictures,” he said. “That looks like some sort of wizard thing.”

“I’m not sure if it’s working. You see, people were beginning to get upset and they didn’t know why, and that made it worse. Their minds were in one reality and their bodies were in another. Very unpleasant. They couldn’t get used to the idea that she was still alive. I thought the pictures might be a good idea but, you know, people just don’t see what their mind tells them isn’t there.”

“I could have told you that,” said Mort bitterly.

“I had the town criers out during the daytime,” Cutwell continued. “I thought that if people could come to believe in her, then this new reality could become the real one.”

“Mmmph?” said Mort. He turned away from the window. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you see—I reckoned that if enough people believed in her, they could change reality. It works for gods. If people stop believing in a god, he dies. If a lot of them believe in him, he grows stronger.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought gods were just gods.”

“They don’t like it talked about,” said Cutwell, shuffling through the heap of books and parchments on his worktable.

“Well, that might work for gods, because they’re special,” said Mort. “People are—more solid. It wouldn’t work for people.”

“That’s not true. Let’s suppose you went out of here and prowled around the palace. One of the guards would probably see you and he’d think you were a thief and he’d fire his crossbow. I mean, in his reality you’d be a thief. It wouldn’t actually be true but you’d be just as dead as if it was. Belief is powerful stuff. I’m a wizard. We know about these things. Look here.”

He pulled a book out of the debris in front of him and opened it at the piece of bacon he’d used as a bookmark. Mort looked over his shoulder, and frowned at the curly magical writing. It moved around on the page, twisting and writhing in an attempt not to be read by a non-wizard, and the general effect was unpleasant.

“What’s this?” he said.

“It’s the Book of the Magick of Alberto Malich the Mage,” said the wizard, “a sort of book of magical theory. It’s not a good idea to look too hard at the words, they resent it. Look, it says here—”

His lips moved soundlessly. Little beads of sweat sprang up on his forehead and decided to get together and go down and see what his nose was doing. His eyes watered.

Some people like to settle down with a good book. No-one in possession of a complete set of marbles would like to settle down with a book of magic, because even the individual words have a private and vindictive life of their own and reading them, in short, is a kind of mental Indian wrestling. Many a young wizard has tried to read a grimoire that is too strong for him, and people who’ve heard the screams have found only his pointy shoes with the classic wisp of smoke coming out of them and a book which is, perhaps, just a little fatter. Things can happen to browsers in magical libraries that make having your face pulled off by tentacled monstrosities from the Dungeon Dimensions seem a mere light massage by comparison.

Fortunately Cutwell had an expurgated edition, with some of the more distressing pages clamped shut (although on quiet nights he could hear the imprisoned words scritching irritably inside their prison, like a spider trapped in a matchbox; anyone who has ever sat next to someone wearing a Walkman will be able to imagine exactly what they sounded like).

“This is the bit,” said Cutwell. “It says here that even gods—”

“I’ve seen him before!”

“What?”

Mort pointed a shaking finger at the book.

“Him!”

Cutwell gave him an odd look and examined the left-hand page. There was a picture of an elderly wizard holding a book and a candlestick in an attitude of near-terminal dignity.

“That’s not part of the magic,” he said testily, “that’s just the author.”

“What does it say under the picture?”

“Er. It says ‘Yff youe have enjoyed thiss Boke, youe maye be interestede yn othere Titles by—”

“No, right under the picture is what I meant!”

“That’s easy. It’s old Malich himself. Every wizard knows him. I mean, he founded the University.” Cutwell chuckled. “There’s a famous statue of him in the main hall, and during Rag Week once I climbed up it and put a—”

Mort stared at the picture.

“Tell me,” he said quietly, “did the statue have a drip on the end of its nose?”

“I shouldn’t think so,” said Cutwell. “It was marble. But I don’t know what you’re getting so worked up about. Lots of people know what he looked like. He’s famous.”

“He lived a long time ago, did he?”

“Two thousand years, I think. Look, I don’t know why—”

“I bet he didn’t die, though,” said Mort. “I bet he just disappeared one day. Did he?”

Cutwell was silent for a moment.

“Funny you should say that,” he said slowly. “There was a legend I heard. He got up to some weird things, they say. They say he blew himself into the Dungeon Dimensions while trying to perform the Rite of AshkEnte backwards. All they found was his hat. Tragic, really. The whole city in mourning for a day just for a hat. It wasn’t even a particularly attractive hat; it had burn marks on it.”

“Alberto Malich,” said Mort, half to himself. “Well. Fancy that.”

He drummed his fingers on the table, although the sound was surprisingly muted.

“Sorry,” said Cutwell. “I can’t get the hang of treacle sandwiches, either.”

“I reckon the interface is moving at a slow walking pace,” said Mort, licking his fingers absent-mindedly. “Can’t you stop it by magic?”

Cutwell shook his head. “Not me. It’d squash me flat,” he said cheerfully.

“What’ll happen to you when it arrives, then?”

“Oh, I’ll go back to living in Wall Street. I mean, I never will have left. All this won’t have happened. Pity, though. The cooking here is pretty good, and they do my laundry for free. How far away did you say it was, by the way?”

“About twenty miles, I guess.”

Cutwell rolled his eyes heavenwards and moved his lips. Eventually he said: “That means it’ll arrive around midnight tomorrow, just in time for the coronation.”

“Whose?”

“Hers.”

“But she’s queen already, isn’t she?”

“In a way, but officially she’s not queen until she’s crowned.” Cutwell grinned, his face a pattern of shade in the candlelight, and added, “If you want a way of thinking about it, then it’s like the difference between stopping living and being dead.”

Twenty minutes earlier Mort had been feeling tired enough to take root. Now he could feel a fizzing in his blood. It was the kind of late-night, frantic energy that you knew you would pay for around midday tomorrow, but for now he felt he had to have some action or else his muscles would snap out of sheer vitality.

“I want to see her,” he said. “If you can’t do anything, there might be something I can do.”

“There’s guards outside her room,” said Cutwell. “I mention this merely as an observation. I don’t imagine for one minute that they’ll make the slightest difference.”

———

It was midnight in Ankh-Morpork, but in the great twin city the only difference between night and day was, well, it was darker. The markets were thronged, the spectators were still thickly clustered around the whore pits, runners-up in the city’s eternal and byzantine gang warfare drifted silently down through the chilly waters of the river with lead weights tied to their feet, dealers in various illegal and even illogical delights plied their sidelong trade, burglars burgled, knives flashed starlight in alleyways, astrologers started their day’s work and in the Shades a nightwatch-man who had lost his way rang his bell and cried out: “Twelve o’clock and all’s arrrrrgghhhh…”

However, the Ankh-Morpork Chamber of Commerce would not be happy at the suggestion that the only real difference between their city and a swamp is the number of legs on the alligators, and indeed in the more select areas of Ankh, which tend to be in the hilly districts where there is a chance of a bit of wind, the nights are gentle and scented with habiscine and cecillia blossoms.