![]() They don't like the food and you can't trust the water and the shamans always hog the deckchairs. On nights such as this, witches are abroad. On nights such as this, evil deeds are done. The driver lashed at the team, the desperate crack of his whip providing a rather neat counterpoint to the crash of the tempest overhead.īehind – only a little way behind, and getting closer -were three hooded riders. ![]() Īnd a coach came hurtling along the rough forest track, jerking violently as the wheels bounced off tree roots. It is important to remember that they always cheat, right up to the end. On nights such as these the gods, as has already been pointed out, play games other than chess with the fates of mortals and the thrones of kings. The woods roared their applause and were full of mists and flying leaves. There was quite effective projection and passion there, and critics agreed that if it would only learn to control its thunder it would be, in years to come, a storm to watch. Now an opening in the weather had given it an opportunity to strut its hour, and it was building up its role in the hope of being spotted by one of the big climates. It had spent years hanging around the provinces, putting in some useful work as a squall, building up experience, making contacts, occasionally leaping out on unsuspecting shepherds or blasting quite small oak trees. The storm was really giving it everything it had. Rocks go for a stroll of an evening.Įven the land, at times, seems alive. In the Ramtops the leaves on the trees move even when there is no breeze. It is the Ramtops that supply the world with most of its witches and wizards. Raw magic crackles invisibly from peak to peak and earths itself in the mountains. Magic glues the Discworld together – magic generated by the turning of the world itself, magic wound like silk out of the underlying structure of existence to suture the wounds of reality.Ī lot of it ends up in the Ramtop Mountains, which stretch from the frozen lands near the Hub all the way, via a lengthy archipelago, to the warm seas which flow endlessly into space over the Rim. Gods prefer simple, vicious games, where you Do Not Achieve Transcendence but Go Straight To Oblivion a key to the understanding of all religion is that a god's idea of amusement is Snakes and Ladders with greased rungs. It would be a pretty good bet that the gods of a world like this probably do not play chess and indeed this is the case. Possibly the Creator of the universe got bored with all the usual business of axial inclination, albedos and rotational velocities, and decided to have a bit of fun for once. A tiny sun and moon spin around them, on a complicated orbit to induce seasons, so probably nowhere else in the multiverse is it sometimes necessary for an elephant to cock a leg to allow the sun to go past.Įxactly why this should be may never be known. Through the fathomless deeps of space swims the star turtle Great A'Tuin, bearing on its back the four giant elephants who carry on their shoulders the mass of the Discworld. As the cauldron bubbled an eldritch voice shrieked: 'When shall we three meet again?'įinally another voice said, in far more ordinary tones: 'Well, I can do next Tuesday.' In the middle of this elemental storm a fire gleamed among the dripping furze bushes like the madness in a weasel's eye. ![]() It was the kind of night, you could believe, on which gods moved men as though they were pawns on the chessboard of fate. The night was as black as the inside of a cat. Thunder rolled back and forth across the dark, rain-lashed hills. Lightning stabbed at the earth erratically, like an inefficient assassin.
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