Sourcery

‘Why? I haven’t done anything!’

She went to the nearest window, pushed open the shutters and paused with one leg over the sill.

‘Fine,’ she said, over her shoulder. ‘Stay here and explain it to the guards.’

‘Why are they chasing you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Oh, come on! There must be a reason!’

‘Oh, there’s plenty of reasons. I just don’t know which one. Are you coming?’

Rincewind hesitated. The Patrician’s personal guard was not known for its responsive approach to community policing, preferring to cut bits off instead. Among the things they took a dim view of was, well, basically, people being in the same universe. Running away from them was likely to be a capital offence.

‘I think maybe I’ll come along with you,’ he said gallantly. ‘A girl can come to harm all alone in this city.’

Freezing fog filled the streets of Ankh-Morpork. The flares of street traders made little yellow haloes in the smothering billows.

The girl peered around a corner.

‘We’ve lost them,’ she said. ‘Stop shaking. You’re safe now.’

‘What, you mean I’m all alone with a female homicidal maniac?’ said Rincewind. ‘Fine.’

She relaxed and laughed at him.

‘I was watching you,’ she said. ‘An hour ago you were afraid that your future was going to be dull and uninteresting.’

‘I want it to be dull and uninteresting,’ said Rincewind bitterly. ‘I’m afraid it’s going to be short.’

‘Turn your back,’ she commanded, stepping into an alley.

‘Not on your life,’ he said.

‘I’m going to take my clothes off.’

Rincewind spun around, his face red. There was a rustling behind him, and a waft of scent. After a while she said, ‘You can look round now.’

He didn’t.

‘You needn’t worry. I’ve put some more on.’

He opened his eyes. The girl was wearing a demure white lace dress with fetchingly puffed sleeves. He opened his mouth. He realised with absolute clarity that up to now the trouble he had been in was simple, modest and nothing he couldn’t talk his way out of given a decent chance or, failing that, a running start. His brain started to send urgent messages to his sprinting muscles, but before they could get through she’d grabbed his arm again.

‘You really shouldn’t be so nervous,’ she said sweetly. ‘Now, let’s have a look at this thing.’

She pulled the lid off the round box in Rincewind’s unprotesting hands, and lifted out the Archchancellor’s hat.

The octarines around its crown blazed in all eight colours of the spectrum, creating the kind of effects in the foggy alley that it would take a very clever special effects director and a whole battery of star filters to achieve by any non-magical means. As she raised it high in the air it created its own nebula of colours that very few people ever see in legal circumstances.

Rincewind sank gently to his knees.

She looked down at him, puzzled.

‘Legs given out?’

‘It’s – it’s the hat. The Archchancellor’s hat,’ said Rincewind, hoarsely. His eyes narrowed. ‘You’ve stolen it!’ he shouted, struggling back to his feet and grabbing for the sparkling brim.

‘It’s just a hat.’

‘Give it to me this minute! Women mustn’t touch it! It belongs to wizards!’

‘Why are you getting so worked up?’ she said.

Rincewind opened his mouth. Rincewind closed his mouth.

He wanted to say: It’s the Archchancellor’s hat, don’t you understand? It’s worn by the head of all wizards, well, on the head of the head of all wizards, no, metaphorically it’s worn by all wizards, potentially, anyway, and it’s what every wizard aspires to, it’s the symbol of organised magic, it’s the pointy tip of the profession, it’s a symbol, it’s what it means to all wizards…

And so on. Rincewind had been told about the hat on his first day at University, and it had sunk into his impressionable mind like a lead weight into a jelly. He wasn’t sure of much in the world, but he was certain that the Archchancellor’s hat was important. Maybe even wizards need a little magic in their lives.

Rincewind, said the hat.

He stared at the girl. ‘It spoke to me!’

‘Like a voice in your head?’

‘Yes!’

‘It did that to me, too.’

‘But it knew my name!’

Of course we do, stupid fellow. We are supposed to be a magic hat after all.

The hat’s voice wasn’t only clothy. It also had a strange choral effect, as if an awful lot of voices were talking at the same time, in almost perfect unison.

Rincewind pulled himself together.

‘O great and wonderful hat,’ he said pompously, ‘strike down this impudent girl who has had the audacity, nay, the—’

Oh, do shut up. She stole us because we ordered her to. It was a near thing, too.

‘But she’s a—’ Rincewind hesitated. ‘She’s of the female persuasion …’ he muttered.

So was your mother.

‘Yes, well, but she ran away before I was born,’ Rincewind mumbled.