The Colour of Magic   ::   Пратчетт Терри

Blind Io picked up the cube and counted the sides. “Come on,” he said wearily, “play fair.”

The Sending of Eight



The road from Ankh-Morpork to Quirm is high, white and winding, a thirty-league stretch of potholes and half-buried rocks that spirals around mountains and dips into cool green valleys of citrus trees, crosses liana-webbed gorges on creaking rope bridges and is generally more picturesque than Picturesque. That was a new word to Rincewind the wizard [ 4 ]. It was one of a number he had picked up since leaving the charred ruins of Ankh-Morpork. Quaint was another one. Picturesque meant—he decided after careful observation of the scenery that inspired Twoflower to use the word—that the landscape was horribly precipitous. Quaint, when used to describe the occasional village through which they passed, meant fever-ridden and tumbledown.

Twoflower was a tourist, the first ever seen on the Discworld. Tourist, Rincewind had decided, meant “idiot”.

As they rode leisurely through the thyme-scented bee-humming air, Rincewind pondered on the experiences of the last few days. While the little foreigner was obviously insane, he was also generous and considerably less lethal than half the people the wizard had mixed with in the city-Rincewind rather liked him. Disliking him would have been like kicking a puppy.

Currently Twoflower was showing a great interest in the theory and practice of magic.

“It all seems, well, rather useless to me,” he said. “I always thought that, you know, a wizard just said the magic words and that was that. Not all this tedious memorising.”

Rincewind agreed moodily. He tried to explain that magic had indeed once been wild and lawless, but had been tamed back in the mists of time by the Olden Ones, who had bound it to obey among other things the Law of Conservation of Reality; this demanded that the effort needed to achieve a goal should be the same regardless of the means used. In practical terms this meant that, say, creating the illusion of a glass of wine was relatively easy, since it involved merely the subtle shifting of light patterns. On the other hand, lifting a genuine wineglass a few feet in the air by sheer mental energy required several hours of systematic preparation if the wizard wished to prevent the simple principle of leverage flicking his brain out through his ears.

He went on to add that some of the ancient magic could still be found in its raw state, recognisable—to the initiated—by the eightfold shape it made in the crystalline structure of space-time.