The Light Fantastic

It was the clock. It was very big, and occupied a space between two curving wooden staircases covered with carvings of things that normal men only see after a heavy session on something illegal.

It had a very long pendulum, and the pendulum swung with a slow tick-tock that set his teeth on edge, because it was the kind of deliberate, annoying ticking that wanted to make it abundantly clear that every tick and every tock was stripping another second off your life. It was the kind of sound that suggested very pointedly that in some hypothetical hourglass, somewhere, another few grains of sand had dropped out from under you.

Needless to say, the weight on the pendulum was knife-edged and razor sharp.

Something tapped him in the small of the back. He turned angrily.

'Look, you son of a suitcase, I told you —'

It wasn't the Luggage. It was a young woman – silver haired, silver eyed, rather taken aback.

'Oh,' said Rincewind. 'Um. Hallo?'

'Are you alive?' she said. It was the kind of voice associated with beach umbrellas, suntan oil and long cool drinks.

'Well, I hope so,' said Rincewind, wondering if his glands were having a good time wherever they were. 'Sometimes I'm not so sure. What is this place?'

'This is the house of Death,' she said.

'Ah,' said Rincewind. He ran a tongue over his dry lips. Well, nice to meet you, I think I ought to be getting along —'

She clapped her hands. 'Oh, you mustn't go!' she said. We don't often have living people here. Dead people are so boring, don't you think?'

'Uh, yes,' Rincewind agreed fervently, eyeing the doorway. 'Not much conversation, I imagine.'

'It's always “When I was alive — ” and “We really knew how to breathe in my day — ”,' she said, laying a small white hand on his arm and smiling at him. They're always so set in their ways, too. No fun at all. So formal.'

'Stiff?' suggested Rincewind. She was propelling him towards an archway.

'Absolutely. What's your name? My name is Ysabell.'

'Um, Rincewind. Excuse me, but if this is the house of Death, what are you doing here? You don't look dead to me.'

'Oh, I live here.' She looked intently at him. 'I say, you haven't come to rescue your lost love, have you? That always annoys daddy, he says it's a good job he never sleeps because if he did he'd be kept awake by the tramp, tramp, tramp of young heroes coming down here to carry back a lot of silly girls, he says.'

'Goes on a lot, does it?' said Rincewind weakly, as they walked along a black-hung corridor.

'All the time. I think it's very romantic. Only when you leave, it's very important not to look back.'

'Why not?'

She shrugged. 'I don't know. Perhaps the view isn't very good. Are you a hero, actually?'

'Um, no. Not as such. Not at all, really. Even less than that, in fact. I just came to look for a friend of mine,' he said wretchedly. 'I suppose you haven't seen him?

Little fat man, talks a lot, wears eyeglasses, funny sort of clothes?'

As he spoke he was aware that he may have missed something vital. He shut his eyes and tried to recall the last few minutes of conversation. Then it hit him like a sandbag.

'Daddy?'

She looked down demurely. 'Adopted, actually,' she said. 'He found me when I was a little girl, he says. It was all rather sad.' She brightened. 'But come and meet him – he's got his friends in tonight, I'm sure hell be interested to see you. He doesn't meet many people socially. Nor do I, actually,' she added.

'Sorry,' said Rincewind. 'Have I got it right? We're talking about Death, yes? Tall, thin, empty eye-sockets, handy in the scythe department?'

She sighed. 'Yes. His looks are against him, I'm afraid.'

While it was true that, as has already been indicated, Rincewind was to magic what a bicycle is to a bumblebee, he nevertheless retained one privilege available to practitioners of the art, which was that at the point of death it would be Death himself who turned up to claim him (instead of delegating the job to a lesser mythological anthropomorphic personification, as is usually the case). Owing largely to inefficiency Rincewind had consistently failed to die at the right time, and if there is one thing that Death does not like it is unpunctuality.

'Look, I expect my friend has just wandered off somewhere,' he said. 'He's always doing that, story of his life, nice to have met you, must be going —'

But she had already stopped in front of a tall door padded with purple velvet. There were voices on the other side – eldritch voices, the sort of voices that mere typography will remain totally unable to convey until someone can make a linotype machine with echo-reverb and, possibly, a typeface that looks like something said by a slug.

This is what the voices were saying:

WOULD YOU MIND EXPLAINING THAT AGAIN?

Well, if you return anything except a trump, South will be able to get in his two ruffs, losing only one Turtle, one Elephant and one Major Arcana, then —'

'That's Twoflower!' hissed Rincewind. 'I'd know that voice anywhere!'

JUST A MINUTE – PESTILENCE IS SOUTH?

'Oh, come on, Mort, He explained that. What if Famine had played a – what was it – a trump return!' It was a breathy, wet voice, practically contagious all by itself.

'Ah, then you'd only be able to ruff one Turtle instead of two,' said Twoflower enthusiastically.

'But if War had chosen a trump lead originally, then the contract would have gone two down?'

'Exactly!'

I DIDN'T QUITE FOLLOW THAT. TELL ME ABOUT PSYCHIC BIDS AGAIN, I THOUGHT I WAS GETTING THE HANG OF THAT. It was a heavy, hollow voice, like two large lumps of lead smashing together.

'That's when you make a bid primarily to deceive your opponents, but of course it might cause problems for your partner —'

Twoflower's voice rambled on in its enthusiastic way. Rincewind looked blankly at Ysabell as words like rebiddable suit', 'double finesse' and 'grand slam' floated through the velvet.

'Do you understand any of that?' she asked.

'Not a word,' he said.

'It sounds awfully complicated.'

On the other side of the door the heavy voice said: 'DID YOU SAY HUMANS PLAY THIS FOR FUN?'

'Some of them get to be very good at it, yes. I'm only an amateur, I'm afraid.'

BUT THEY ONLY LIVE EIGHTY OR NINETY YEARS!

'You should know, Mort,' said a voice that Rincewind hadn't heard before and certainly never wanted to hear again, especially after dark.

'It's certainly very – intriguing.'

DEAL AGAIN AND LET'S SEE IF I'VE GOT THE HANG OF IT.

'Do you think perhaps we should go in?' said Ysabell. A voice behind the door said, I BID . . . THE KNAVE OF TERRAPINS.

'No, sorry, I'm sure you're wrong, let's have a look at your —'

Ysabell pushed the door open.

It was, in fact, a rather pleasant study, perhaps a little on the sombre side, possibly created on a bad day by an interior designer who had a headache and a craving for putting large hourglasses on every flat surface and also a lot of large, fat, yellow and extremely runny candles he wanted to get rid of.

The Death of the Disc was a traditionalist who prided himself on his personal service and spent most of the time being depressed because this was not appreciated. He would point out that no-one feared death itself, just pain and separation and oblivion, and that it was quite unreasonable to take against someone just because he had empty eye-sockets and a quiet pride in his work. He still used a scythe, he'd point out, while the Deaths of other worlds had long ago invested in combined harvesters.

Death sat at one side of a black baize table in the centre of the room, arguing with Famine, War and Pestilence. Twoflower was the only one to look up and notice Rincewind.

'Hey, how did you get here?' he said.

'Well, some say the Creator took a handful – oh, I see, well, it's hard to explain but I —'

'Have you got the Luggage?'

The wooden box pushed past Rincewind and settled down in front of its owner, who opened its lid and rummaged around inside until he came up with a small, leatherbound book which he handed to War, who was hammering the table with a mailed fist.

'It's :Nosehinger on the Laws of Contract:,' he said. It's quite good, there's a lot in it about double finessing and how to —'

Death snatched the book with a bony hand and flipped through the pages, quite oblivious to the presence of the two men.

RIGHT, he said, PESTILENCE, OPEN ANOTHER PACK OF CARDS. I'M GOING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF THIS IF IT KILLS ME, FIGURATIVELY SPEAKING OF COURSE.

Rincewind grabbed Twoflower and pulled him out of the room: As they jogged down the corridor with the Luggage galloping behind them he said:

'What was all that about?'

'Well, they've got lots of time and I thought they might enjoy it,' panted Twoflower.

'What, playing with cards?'

'It's a special kind of playing,' said Twoflower. 'It's called—' he hesitated. Language wasn't his strong point. 'In your language it's called a thing you put across a river, for example,' he concluded, 'I think.'

'Aqueduct?' hazarded Rincewind. 'Fishing line? Weir? Dam?'

'Yes, possibly.'

They reached the hallway, where the big clock still shaved the seconds off the lives of the world.

'And how long do you think that'll keep them occupied?'

Twoflower paused. 'I'm not sure,' he said thoughtfully. Probably until the last trump – what an amazing clock. . .'

'Don't try to buy it,' Rincewind advised. 'I don't think they'd appreciate it around here.'

'Where is here, exactly?' said Twoflower, beckoning the Luggage and opening its lid.

Rincewind looked around. The hall was dark and deserted, its tall narrow windows whorled with ice. He looked down. There was the faint blue line stretching away from his ankle. Now he could see that Twoflower had one too.

'We're sort of informally dead,' he said. It was the best he could manage.

'Oh.' Twoflower continued to rummage.

'Doesn't that worry you?'

'Well, things tend to work out in the end, don't you think? Anyway, I'm a firm believer in reincarnation. What would you like to come back as?'

'I don't want to go,' said Rincewind firmly. 'Come on, let's get out of – oh, no. Not that.'

Twoflower had produced a box from the depths of the Luggage. It was large and black and had a handle on one side and a little round window in front and a strap so that Twoflower could put it around his neck, which he did.

There was a time when Rincewind had quite liked the iconoscope. He believed, against all experience, that the world was fundamentally understandable, and that if he could only equip himself with the right mental toolbox he could take the back off and see how it worked. He was, of course, dead wrong. The iconoscope didn't take pictures by letting light fall onto specially treated paper, as he had surmised, but by the far simpler method of imprisoning a small demon with a good eye for colour and a speedy hand with a paintbrush. He had been very upset to find that out.

'You haven't got time to take pictures!' he hissed.

'It won't take long,' said Twoflower firmly, and rapped on the side of the box. A tiny door flew open and the imp poked his head out.

'Bloody hell,' it said. 'Where are we?'

'It doesn't matter,' said Twoflower. The clock first, I think.'

The demon squinted.

'Poor light,' he said. Three bloody years at f8, if you ask me.' He slammed the door shut. A second later there was the tiny scraping noise of his stool being dragged up to his easel.

Rincewind gritted his teeth.

'You don't need to take pictures, you can just remember it!' he shouted.