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BOOK I
The Book of Going Forth
Nothing but stars, scattered across the blackness as though the Creator had smashed the windscreen of his car and hadn’t bothered to stop to sweep up the pieces This is the gulf between universes, the chill deeps of space that contain nothing but the occasional random molecule, a few lost comets and
but a circle of blackness shifts slightly, the eye reconsiders perspective, and as apparently the awesome distance of interstellar wossnahts of ill charitably be called civilisation
For, as the world tumbles lazily, it is revealed as the Discworld - flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great A’tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagra, dusted with the frost of dead comets, meteor-pocked, albedo-eyed No-one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that
It’s happening already
The stars below are caes high in the forested mountains Towns are sreat sprawling city of Ankh-Morpork, for exaalaxies
But here, away froreat centres of population, where the Circle Sea meets the desert, there is a line of cold blue fire Flames as chilly as the slopes of Hell roar towards the sky Ghostly light flickers across the desert The pyra their power into the night
The energy strea up from their paracosmic peaks may, in chapters to come, illuminate many ion is bad for goats, and what it is that handmaidens actually do
It will certainly shohat our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today People have often speculated about this Would they approve of modern society, they ask, would they marvel at present-day achievements? And of course this misses a funda, if they were alive today, is: ’Why is it so dark in here?’
In the cool of the river valley dawn the high priest Dios opened his eyes He didn’t sleep these days He couldn’t remember when he last slept Sleep was too close to the other thing and, anyway, he didn’t seeh - at least, just lying down here The fatigue poisons dwindled away, like everything else For a while
Long enough, anyway
He swung his legs off the slab in the little chaht hand grasped the snake-entwined staff of office He paused to make another mark on the wall, pulled his robe around hie and out into the sunlight, the words of the Invocation of the New Sun already lining up in his otten, the day was ahead There was iven, and Dios existed only to serve
Dios didn’t have the oddest bedroom in the world It was just the oddest bedroom anyone has ever walked out of
And the sun toiled across the sky
Many people have wondered why So beetle pushes it As explanations go it lacks a certain technical edge, and has the added drawback that, as certain circumstances may reveal, it is possibly correct
It reached sundoithout anything particularly unpleasant happening to it[1], and its dying rays chanced to shine in through ain the city of Ankh-Morpork and gleath th mirror in their rooms, because it would be a terrible insult to anyone to kill them when you were badly dressed
Teppic examined himself critically The outfit had cost him his last penny, and was heavy on the black silk It whispered as he ood
At least the headache was going It had nearly crippled hi to start the run with purple spots in front of his eyes
He sighed and opened the black box and took out his rings and slipped them on Another box held a set of knives of Klatchian steel, their blades darkened with la and intricate devices were taken fro-bladed throwing tlingo’s were slipped into their sheaths inside his boots A thin silk line and folding grapnel ound around his waist, over the chain- and dropped down his back under his cloak; Teppic pocketed a slim tin container with an assortment of darts, their tips corked and their stems braille-coded for ease of selection in the dark
He winced, checked the blade of his rapier and slung the baldric over his right shoulder, to balance the bag of lead slingshot aht he opened his sock drawer and took a pistol crossbow, a flask of oil, a roll of lockpicks and, after so of assorted caltraps and a set of brass knuckles
Teppic picked up his hat and checked its lining for the coil of cheesewire He placed it on his head at a jaunty angle, took a last satisfied look at himself in the mirror, turned on his heel and, very slowly, fell over
It was high suh It was stinking
The great river was reduced to a lava-like ooze between Ankh, the city with the better address, and Morpork on the opposite bank Morpork was not a good address Morpork inned with a tar pit There was not a lot that could be done to make Morpork a worse place A direct hit by a entrification
Most of the river bed was a honeycomb crust of crackednailed to the sky The heat that had dried up the river fried the city by day and baked it by night, curling ancient ti the traditional slurry of the streets into a drifting, choking ochre dust
It wasn’t Ankh-Morpork’s proper weather It was by inclination a city ofon the crisping plains like a toad on a firebrick And even now, aroundthe streets like scorched velvet, searing the air and squeezing all the breath out of it
High in the north face of the Assassins’ Guildhouse there was a click as a as pushed open
Teppic, who had with considerable reluctance divested hiht of the hot, dead air
This was it
This was the night
They said you had one chance in two unless you drew old Mericet as exaht at the start