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Bethan elbowed Twoflower in the ribs.
'Do something,' she said.
'Um,' said Twoflower. 'Yes. That's about enough, I think. Put him down, please.'
The Luggage gave a creak of betrayal at the sound of its master's voice. Its lid flew up with such force that Cohen tumbled backwards, but he scrambled to his feet and flung himself towards the box.
Its contents lay open to the skies.
Cohen reached inside.
The Luggage creaked a bit, but had obviously weighed up the chances of being sent to the top of that Great Wardrobe in the Sky. When Rincewind dared to peek through his fingers Cohen was peering into the Luggage and cursing under his breath.
'Laundry?' he shouted. 'Is that it? Just laundry?' He was shaking with rage.
'I think there's some biscuits too,' said Twoflower in a small voice.
'But there wash gold! And I shaw it eat shomebody!' Cohen looked imploringly at Rincewind.
The wizard sighed. 'Don't ask me,' he said. 'I don't own the bloody thing.'
'I bought it in a shop,' said Twoflower defensively. 'I said I wanted a travelling trunk.'
'That's what you got, all right,' said Rincewind.
'It's very loyal,' said Twoflower.
'Oh yes,' agreed Rincewind. 'If loyalty is what you look for in a suitcase.'
'Hold on,' said Cohen, who had sagged onto a rock. Wash it one of thoshe shopsh – I mean, I bet you hadn't noticed it before and when you went back again it washn't there?'
Twoflower brightened. 'That's right!'
'Shopkeeper a little wizened old guy? Shop full of strange shtuff?'
'Exactly! Never could find it again, I thought I must have got the wrong street, nothing but a brick wall where I thought it was, I remember thinking at the time it was rather —'
Cohen shrugged. 'One of those shops[5],' he said. That explainsh it, then.' He felt his back, and grimaced. 'Bloody horshe ran off with my linament!'
Rincewind remembered something, and fumbled in the depths of his torn and now very grubby robe. He held up a green bottle.
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 philosophising, and after a while starts to forget about its extremities. It begins to crystallise 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 sili-caceous 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 rock-slides 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.
