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'Spell giving you trouble?'
'Yargh.'
'Try humming.'
Rincewind grimaced. 'I'm going to get rid of this thing,' he said thickly. 'It's going back into the book where it belongs. I want my head back!'
'But then—' Twoflower began, and stopped. They could all hear it – a distant chanting and the stamping of many feet.
'Do you think it's star people?' said Bethan.
It was. The lead marchers came around a corner a hundred yards away, behind a ragged white banner with an eight-pointed star on it.
'Not just star people,' said Twoflower. 'All kinds of people!'
The crowd swept them up in its passage. One moment they were standing in the deserted street, the next they were perforce moving with a tide of humanity that bore them onwards through the city.
Torchlight flickered easily on the damp tunnels far under the University as the heads of the eight Orders of wizardry filed onwards.
'At least it's cool down here,' said one.
'We shouldn't be down here.'
Trymon, who was leading the party, said nothing. But he was thinking very hard. He was thinking about the ottle of oil in his belt, and the eight keys the wizards carried – eight keys that would fit the eight locks that chained the Octavo to its lectern. He was thinking that old wizards who sense that magic is draining away are preoccupied with their own problems and are perhaps less alert than they should be. He was thinking that within a few minutes the Octavo, the greatest concentration of magic on the Disc, would be under his hands.
Despite the coolness of the tunnel he began to sweat.
They came to a lead-lined door set in the sheer stone. Trymon took a heavy key – a good, honest iron key, not like the twisted and disconcerting keys that would unlock the Octavo – gave the lock a squirt of oil, inserted the key, turned it. The lock squeaked open protestingly.
'Are we of one resolve?' said Trymon. There was a series of vaguely affirmative grunts.
He pushed at the door.
A warm gale of thick and somehow oily air rolled over them. The air was filled with a high-pitched and unpleasant chittering. Tiny sparks of octarine fire flared off every nose, fingernail and beard.
The wizards, their heads bowed against the storm of randomised magic that blew out of the room, pushed forward. Half-formed shapes giggled and fluttered around them as the nightmare inhabitants of the Dungeon Dimensions constantly probed (with things that passed for fingers only because they were at the ends of their arms) for an unguarded entry into the circle of firelight that passed for the universe of reason and order.
Even at this bad time for all things magical, even in a room designed to damp down all magical vibrations, the Octavo was still crackling with power.
There was no real need for the torches. The Octavo filled the room with a dull, sullen light, which wasn't strictly light at all but the opposite of light; darkness isn't the opposite of light, it is simply its absence, and what was radiating from the book was the light that lies on the far side of darkness, the light fantastic.
It was a rather disappointing purple colour.
As has been noted before, the Octavo was chained to a lectern carved into the shape of something that looked vaguely avian, slightly reptilian and horribly alive. Two glittering eyes regarded the wizards with hooded hatred.
'I saw it move,' said one of them.
'We're safe so long as we don't touch the book,' said Trymon. He pulled a scroll out of his belt and unrolled it.
'Bring that torch here,' he said, 'and put that cigarette out!'
He waited for the explosion of infuriated pride. But none came. Instead, the offending mage removed the dogend from his lips with trembling fingers and ground it into the floor.
Trymon exulted. So, he thought, they do what I say. Just for now, maybe – but just for now is enough.
He peered at the crabby writing of a wizard long dead.
'Right,' he said, let's see: “To Appease Yt, The Thynge That Ys The Guardian . . .” '
