Reaper Man

"Ha!" said someone who had much less skin than Ridcully would have liked him to have. "That's typical. That's naked vitalism, that is. I bet they'd rescue someone in there if they happened to be alive."

"But he wanted... he wasn't keen on... he... " Ridcully hazarded. A lot of this was beyond him, but to people like Ridcully this didn't matter for very long. Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn't mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges.

He concentrated on the single main fact. Someone who was technically a wizard was in trouble. He could relate to that. It struck a chord. The whole dead-or-alive business could wait.

There was another minor point that nagged at him, though.

"... Arthur?... flew?..."

"Hallo."

Ridcully turned his head. He blinked slowly.

"Nice teeth YOU got there," he said.

"Thank you," said Arthur Winkings.

"All your own, are they?"

"Oh, yes."

"Amazing. Of course, I expect you brush regularly."

"Yes?"

"Hygienic. That's the important thing."

"So what are you going to do?" said Ludmilla.

"Well, we'll just go and fetch him out, " said Ridcully.

What was it about the girl? He felt a strange urge to pat her on the head. "We'll get some magic and get him out. Yes. Dean!"

"Yo!"

"We ‘re just going to go in there to get Windle out."

"Yo!"

"What?" said the Senior Wrangler. ‘You must be out of your mind!"

Ridcully tried to look as dignified as possible, given his situation.

"Remember that I am your Archchancellor," he snapped.

"Then you must be out of your mind, Archchancellor!" said the Senior Wrangler. He lowered his voice. "Anyway, he's an undead. I don't see how you can save undeads. It's a sort of contradiction in terms."

"A dichotomy, " said the Bursar helpfully.

"Oh, I don't think surgery is involved."

"Anyway, didn't we bury him?" said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.

"And now we dig him up again," said the Archchancellor. "It's probably a miracle of existence."

"Like pickles," said the Bursar, happily.

Even the Fresh Starters went blank.

"They do that in parts of Howondaland," said the Bursar. "They make these big, big jars of special pickles and then they bury them in the ground for months to ferment and they get this lovely piquant -"

"Tell me," Ludmilla whispered to Ridcully, "is this how wizards usually behave?"

"The Senior Wrangler is an amazingly fine example," said Ridcully. "Got the same urgent grasp of reality as a cardboard cut-out. Proud to have him on the team." He rubbed his hands together. "OK, lads. Volunteers?"

"Yo! Hut!" said the Dean, who was in an entirely different world now.

"I would be remiss in my duty if I failed to help a brother," said Reg Shoe.

"Oook."

"You? We can't take you," said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. "You don't know a thing about guerrilla warfare."

"Oook!" said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn't know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean.

"Four of us should be enough," said the Archchancellor.

"I've never even heard him say "Yo"," muttered the Dean.

He removed his hat, something a wizard doesn't ordinarily do unless he's about to pull something out of it, and handed it to the Bursar. Then he tore a thin strip off the bottom of his robe, held it dramatically in both hands, and tied it around his forehead.

"It's part of the ethos," he said, in answer to their penetratingly unspoken question. ‘That's what the warriors on the Counter-weight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout -' He tried to remember some far-off reading. "- er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!"

"I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small," said the Senior Wrangler.

The Dean hesitated. He wasn't too sure himself, if it came to it. But a good wizard never let uncertainty stand in his way.

"No, it's definitely got to be bonsai," he said. He considered it some more and then brightened up. "On account of it all being part of bushido. Like... small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it."

"But you can't shout "bonsai!" here," said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. "We've got a totally different cultural background. It'd be useless. No-one will know what you mean."

"I'll work on it," said the Dean.

He noticed Ludmilla standing with her mouth open.

"This is wizard talk," he said.

"It is, isn't it," said Ludmilla. "I never would have guessed."

The Archchancellor had got out of the trolley and was wheeling it experimentally back and forth. It usually took quite a long time for a fresh idea to fully lodge in Ridcully's mind, but he felt instinctively that there were all sorts of uses for a wire basket on four wheels.

"Are we going or are we standin' around all night bandagin' our heads?" he said.

"Yo!" snapped the Dean.

"Yo?" said Reg Shoe.

"Oook!"

"Was that a yo?" said the Dean, suspiciously.

"Oook."

"Well... all right, then."