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“What? What?” said Rincewind.
“Yes, definitely,” said da Quirm. “I'm absolutely sure about it. They did them up very tightly and professionally. Not an inch of give in them anywhere.” “Thank you,” said Rincewind. The flat top of the truncated pyramid was in fact quite large, with plenty of room for
statues, priests, slabs, gutters, knife-chipping production lines and all the other things the
Tezumen needed for the bulk disposal of religion. In front of Rincewind several priests were busily chanting a long list of complaints about swamps, mosquitoes, lack of metal ore, volcanoes, the weather, the way obsidian never kept it's edge, the trouble with having a god like Quezovercoatl, the way wheels never worked properly however often you laid them flat and pushed them, and so on.
The prayers of most religions generally praise and thank the gods involved, either out of general piety or in the hope that he or she will take the hint and start acting responsibly. The Tezumen, having taken a long hard look around their world and decided bluntly that things were just about as bad as they were ever going to get, had perfected the art of the plain-chant winge.
“Won't be long now,” said the parrot, from its perch atop a statue of one of the Tezumen's lesser gods.
It had got there by a complicated sequence of events that had involved a lot of squawking, a cloud of feathers and three Tezumen priests with badly swollen thumbs.
“The high priest is just performing a wossname in honour of Quezovercoatl,” it went on, conversationally. “You've drawn quite a crowd.”
“I suppose you wouldn't kind of hop down here and bite through these ropes, would you?” said Rincewind.
“Not a chance.”
“Thought so.”
“Sun's coming up soon,” the parrot continued. Rincewind felt that it sounded unnecessarily cheerful.
“I'm going to complain about this, demon,” moaned Eric. “You wait my mother finds out. My parents have got influence, you know.”
“Oh, good,” said Rincewind weakly. “Why don't you tell the high priest that if he cuts your heart out she'll be right down to the school tomorrow to complain.”
The Tezumen priests bowed towards the sun, and all eyes in the crowd below turned to the jungle.
Where something was happening. There was the sound of crackling undergrowth. Tropical birds erupted through the trees, shrieking.
Rincewind, of course, could not see this.
“You never should have wanted to be ruler of the world,” he said. “I mean, what did you expect? You can't expect people to be happy about seeing you. No-one ever is when the landlord turns up.”
“But they're going to kill me!”
“It's just their way of saying that, metaphorically, they're fed up with waiting for you to repaint the place and see to the drains.”
The whole jungle was in uproar now. Animals exploded out of the bushes as if running from a fire. A few heavy thumps indicated that trees were falling over.
At last a frantic jaguar crashed through the undergrowth and loped down the causeway. The Luggage was a few feet behind it.
It was covered with creepers, leaves and the feathers of various rare jungle fowls, some of which were now even rarer. The jaguar could have avoided it by zigging or zagging to either side, but sheer idiot terror prevented it. It made the mistake of turning its head to see what was behind.
o;Let's just run through this again, shall we?” said the Demon King. He leaned back in his
throne.
“You just happened to find the Tezumen one day and decided, I think I recall your words correctly, that they were 'a bunch of Stone-Age no-hopers sitting around in a swamp being no trouble to anyone', am I right? Whereupon you entered the mind of one of their high priests - I believe at the time they worshiped a small stick - drove him insane and inspired the tribes to unite, terrorise their neighbours and bring forth upon the continent a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men should be taken to the top of ceremonial pyramids and be chopped up with stone knives.” The King pulled his notes towards him. “Oh yes, some of them were also to be flayed alive,” he added.
Quezovercoatl shuffled his feet.
“Whereupon,” said the King, “they immediately engaged in a prolonged war with just about everyone else, bringing death and destruction to thousands of moderately blameless people, ekcetra, ekcetra. Now, look, this sort of thing has got to stop.”
Quezovercoatl swayed back a bit.
“It was only, you know, a hobby,” said the imp. “I thought, you know, it was the right thing, sort of, thing. Death and destruction and that.”
