The Last Continent

EVERYONE IS. EVENTUALLY.

The wall opened and closed around Death as if it wasn't there, which was, from his lengthy perspective, quite true.

'But how? I can't walk through—' Rincewind began.

He sat down again. The sheep cowered in the corner.

Rincewind looked at the untouched meat pie floater and gave the pie a prod. It sank slowly beneath the vivid green soup.

The sounds of the city filtered in.

After a while the pie rose again like a forgotten continent, sending a very small wave slopping against the edge of the bowl.

Rincewind lay back on the thin blanket and stared at the ceiling. Someone had even been writing on that, too. In fact...

Gdy Mat. Look at the hinjis. Ned.

Slowly, as if being raised by invisible strings, Rincewind turned and looked at the door.

The hinges were massive. They weren't screwed into the doorframe so that some clever prisoner might unscrew them. They were huge iron hooks, hammered into the stone itself, so that two heavy rings welded on to the door could drop right down on them. What was the man talking about?

He walked over and examined the lock closely. It drove a huge metal rod into the frame on its side and looked quite unpickable.

Rincewind stared at the door for some time. Then he rubbed his hands together and, gritting his teeth, tried to lift the door on the hinge side. Yes, there was just enough play...

It was possible to lift the rings off the spikes.

Then, if you pulled slightly and took a knee-wobbling step this way, you could yank the lock's rod out of its hole and the entire door into the cell.

And then a man could walk through and carefully rehang the door again and quietly wander away.

And that, Rincewind thought as he carefully manoeuvred the door back on to the hinges, was exactly what a stupid person would do.

At moments like this cowardice was an exact science. There were times that called for mindless, terror-filled panic, and times that called for measured, considered, thoughtful panic. Right now he was in a place of safety. It was, admittedly, the death cell, but the point was that it was perhaps the one place in this country where nothing bad was going to happen for a little while. The Ecksians didn't look like the kind of people who went in for torture, although it was always possible they might make him eat some more of their food. So, for the moment, he had time. Time to plan ahead, to consider his next move, to apply his intellect to the problem at hand.

He stared at the wall for a moment, and then stood up and gripped the bars.

Right. That seemed to be about long enough. Now to run like hell.

The green deck of the melon boat had been divided into a male and female section, for the sake of decency. This meant that most of the deck was occupied by Mrs Whitlow, who spent a lot of the time sunbathing behind a screen. Her privacy was assured by the wizards themselves, since at least three of them would probably kill any of the others who ventured within ten feet of the palm leaves.

There was definitely what Ponder's aunt, who'd raised him, would have called An Atmosphere.

'I still think I ought to climb the mast,' he protested.

'Ah! A peeping torn, eh?' snarled the Senior Wrangler.

'No, I just think it would be a good idea to see where the boat is going,' said Ponder. There're some big black clouds ahead.'

'Good, we could do with the rain,' snapped the Chair of Indefinite Studies.

'In which case, I shall be honoured to make Mrs Whitlow a suitable shelter,' said the Dean.

Ponder walked back to the stern, where the Archchancellor was gloomily fishing.

'Honestly, you'd think Mrs Whitlow was the only woman in the world,' he said.

'Do you think she might be?' said Ridcully.

Ponder's mind raced, and hit some horrible speed bumps in his imagination. 'Surely not, sir!' he said.

'We don't know, Ponder. Still, look on the bright side. We may all be drowned.'

'Er... sir? Have you looked at the horizon?'

The everlasting storm was seven thousand miles long but only a mile wide, a great turning, boiling mass of enraged air circling the last continent like a family of foxes circling a henhouse. The clouds were mounded up all the way to the edge of the atmosphere – and they were ancient clouds now, clouds that had rolled around their tortured circuit for years, building up personality and hatred and, above all, voltage.

It was not a storm, it was a battle. Mere gales, a few hundred miles long, fought amongst themselves within the cloud wall. Lightning forked from thunderhead to thunderhead, rain fell and flashed into steam half a mile from the ground.

The air glowed.

And below, emerging from the ocean of potentiality in a rainstorm so thunderous that it was no more than a descending sea, rose the last continent.

On the wall of the deserted cell in Bugarup Gaol, among the scratches and stick drawings and tallies of a man's last few days, a drawing of a sheep became a drawing of a kangaroo and then faded completely into the stone.