Eric

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Eric is the Discworld's only demonology hacker.

Pity he's not very good at it.

All he wants is three wishes granted. Nothing fancy -- to be immortal, rule the world, have the most beautiful woman in the world fall madly in love with him, the usual stuff.

But instead of a tractable demon, he calls up Rincewind, probably the most incompetent wizard in the universe, and the extremely intractable and hostile form of travel accessory known as the Luggage.

With them on his side, Eric's in for a ride through space and time that is bound to make him wish (quite fervently) again -- this time that he'd never been born.

Quotes

...the hives of Death are among the black grass in the black orchard under the black-blossomed, ancient boughs of trees that will, eventually, produce apples that ... put it like this ... probably won't be red.

Like all beekeepers, Death wore a veil. It wasn't that he had anything to sting, but sometimes a bee would get inside his skull and buzz around and give him a headache.

There is nowhere Death will not go, no matter how distant and dangerous. In fact the more dangerous it is, the more likely he is to be there already.

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpock. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can't simply be chained to the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates. Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers.

[Ezrolith Churn] was ninety-eight, and had achieved this worthwhile age by carefully not being any trouble or threat to anyone.

[The continent of Ku] had slipped into the ocean several thousand years ago. [Footnote: It took thirty years to subside. The inhabitants spent a lot of the time wading. It went down in history as the multiverse's most embarassing continental catastrophe.]

The librarian was, ex officio, a member of the college council. No-one had been able to find any rule about orang-utans being barred, although they had surreptiously looked very hard for one.

Old Tom was the single cracked bronze bell in the University bell tower. The clapper dropped out shortly after it was cast, but the bell still tolled out some tremendously sonorous silences every hour.

It is the most serious ritual eight wizards can undertake. It summons Death, who naturally knows everything that is going on everywhere. And of course it's done with reluctance, because senior wizards are generally very old and would prefer not to do anything to draw Death's attention in their direction.

You could always tell a wizard's robe; it was bedecked with sequins, sigils, fur and lace, and there was usually a considerable amount of wizard inside it.

Archchancellor: "Who's the fella with the stick?"
Bursar: "It's Death, Archchancellor."
Archchancellor: "Eh?"
Bursar: "It's Death, sir. You know."
Archchancellor: "Tell him we don't want any."
Bursar: "We summoned him, Archchancellor."
Archchancellor: "Is it? What'd we go and do that for? Bloody silly thing to do."

The Bursar was referring obliquely to the difficult occassion when the University very nearly caused the end of the world ... The whole affair was very embarassing to wizards, as it always is to people who find out afterwards that they were on the wrong side all along [Footnote: i.e., the one that lost]

There had been some desultory talk about putting up a statue to Rincewind but, by the curious alchemy that tends to apply in these sensitive issues, this quickly became a plaque, then a note on the Roll of Honour, and finally a motion of censure for being improperly dressed.

Eric: "I warn you. I am protected by many powerful amulets."
Rincewind: "Jolly good. I wish I was."

"Obey my evey command or I will return thee unto the boiling hell from which you came. Thou came, sorry. Thou came'st, in fact. And I really mean it."

Eric: "I am not fooled by thy outer garb, demon. Anyway, demons always lie. Well-known fact."
Rincewind: "It is? In that case, then -- I am a demon."
Eric: "Aha! Condemned out of your own mouth!"

Rincewind wanted to say: Look, what you should do is stop all this messing around with chemicals in a dark room and have a shave, a haircut, a bath, make that two baths, buy yourself a new wardrobe and get out of an evening and then ... and then you could have your face slapped by the woman of your choice.

I mean, it wouldn't be much, but it would be body contact.

"Most demons, when they want to look human, materialise in the shape of nobels, kings and princes. This moth-eaten-wizard look is very clever."

Rincewind: "That's a false beard! How old are you?"
Eric: "Eighty-seven!"
Rincewind: "I can see the hooks over your ears!"
Eric: "Seventy-eight, honest! Avaunt!"
Rincewind: "You're a little boy!"
Eric: "I'm not! I'm nearly fourteen!"
Rincewind: "Ah-ha!"

...any wizard bright enough to survive for five minutes was also bright enough to realise that if there was any power in demonology, then it lay with the demons. Using it for your own purposes would be like trying to beat mice to death with a rattlesnake.

Rincewind stared at the [parrot] on the perch. It had one eye that glittered like a ruby. Most of the rest of it was pink and purple skin, studded with the fag-ends of feathers, so that the net effect was of an oven-ready hairbrush.

"Bright lad. I blame the wossnames, parents. New money, you know. Wine business. Spoil him rotten,let him play with his wossname's old stuff. 'Oh he's such an intelligent lad, nose always in a book'," the parrot mimicked. "They never give him any of the things a sensitive growing wossnamereally needs, if you was to ask me."

"What, you mean love and guidance?" said Rincewind.

"I was thinking of a pretty good wossname, thrashing," said the parrot.

"He was trying to conjure up a succubus." It should be impossible to leer when all you've got is a beak, but the parrot managed it.

Demons have existed on the Discworld for at least as long as the gods, who in many cases they closely resemble. The difference is basically the same as that between terrorists and freedom fighters.

Interestingly enough, the gods of the Disc have never bothered much about judging the souls of the dead, and so people only go to hell if that's where they believe, in their deepest heart, that they deserve to go. Which they won't do if they don't know about it. This explains why it is important to shoot missionaries on sight.

Hell needed horribly-bright, self-centered people like Eric. They were much better at being nasty than demons could ever manage.

His [demon lord] predecessors had favoured shaggy hind legs and hoofs. Lord Astfgl had rejected all that sort of thing out ofhand. He held that no-one would ever get taken seriously by those stuck-up bastards in Dunmanifestin when their rear end kept ruminating all the time...

After a while he went and looked up the name "Rincewind" in the filing cabinet he had recently had installed ... the system still needed ironing out, though, because the bewildered demons filed everything under P for People.

Eric: "Demon? What shape are you?"
Rincewind: "Pretty poor shape."

It was a bowl of cereal, nuts, and dried fruit. He didn't have any quarrel with any of that. it was just that somewhere in the preparation something had apparently done to these innocent ingredients what it takes a million gravities to do to a neutron star. If you died of eating this sort of thing they wouldn't have to bury you, they would just need to drop you somewhere where the ground was soft.

"It's just my Luggage," said Rincewind desperately. "It's a sort of ... well, it goes everywhere with me, there's nothing demonic about it ... er." He hesitated. "Not much, anyway," he finished lamely.

Rincewind gave his fingers a long shocked stare, as one might regard a gun that has been hanging on the wall for decades and has suddenly gone off and perforated the cat.

The Disc might almost have been designed to be seen from space; it wasn't, Rincewind was damned sure, been designed to be lived on.

There might have been more efficient ways to build a world. You might start with a ball of molten iron and then coat it with successive layers of rock, like an old-fashioned gobstopper. And you'd have a very efficient planet, but it wouldn't look so nice. Besides, things would drop off the bottom.

...so many things had happened to [Rincewind] recently he was prepared to concede that he might have died and not noticed it in the confusion...

Rincewind had been told that death was just like going into another room. The difference is, when you shout, "Where's my clean socks?", no-one answers.

"The kings of the world," said Eric. "They've got to pay me tribute."

"You've really been studying this, haven't you?" said Rincewind sarcastically. "Just tribute? You don't fancy the moon while we're up here? This week's special offer, one free satellite with every world dominated?"

Pre-eminent amongst Rincewind's talents was his skill in running away, which over the years he had elevated to the status of a genuinely pure science; it didn't matter if you were fleeing from or who, so long as you were fleeing.

I run, therefore I am; more correctly, I run, therefore with any luck I'll still be.

He could shout "help!" in fourteen languages and scream for mercy in a further twelve.

Jungle surrounded him. it wasn't nice, interesting, open jungle, such as leopard-skin-clad heroes might swing through, but serious, real jungle, jungle that towered up like solid slabs of greenness, thorned and barbed, jungle in which every representative of the vegetable kingdom had really rolled up its bark and got down to the strenuous business of outgrowing all competitors.

"This is probably the rain forests of Klatch," said Rincewind. "They're stuffed full of lost kingdoms."

"You mean mysterious ancient races of Amazonian princesses who subject all male prisoners to strange and exhausting progenitative rites?" said Eric, his glasses beginning to fog.

In the jungles of central Klatch there are, indeed, lost kingdoms of mysterious Amazonian princesses who capture male explorers for specifically masculine duties. These are indeed rigorous and exhausting and the luckless victims do not last long. [Footnote: That is because wiring plugs, putting up shelves, sorting out the funny noises in attics and mowing lawns can eventually reduce even the strongest constitution.]

-- What, you were expecting something else?

Rincewind: "The Tezuman priests have a sophisticated calendar and an advanced horology."
Eric: "Ah. Good."
Rincewind: "No. It means time measurement."
Eric: "Oh."

As they said, you always knew where you stood with Quezovercoatl. It was generally with a lot of people on top of a great stepped pyramid with someone in an elegant feathered headdress chipping an exquisite obsidian knife for your very own personal use.

The Tezumen had realized long ago that everything was steadily getting worse and, having a terrible little-mindedness, had developed a complex system to keep track of how much worse each succeeding day was.

...Rincewind saw that each man wore what would probably be described as a primitive sword, made by affixing shards of obsidian into a wooden club. They looked to him no less deadly than sophisticated, extremely civilised swords. In fact, they looked worse.

Rinceind: "Why do you keep saying wossname?"
Parrot: "Limited wossname. Doodah. Thingy. You know. It's got words in it."
Rincewind: "Dictionary?"

Rincewind wasn't used to people being pleased to see him. It was unnatural, and boded no good.

These people were not only cheering, they were throwing flowers and hats. The hats were made of stone, but the thought was there.

There are quite a lot of uses to which you can put a stone disc with a hole in the middle, and the Tezumen had explored all but one of them.

While working his way along a wall he came to a huge door, which artistically portrayed a group of prisoners apparently being given a complete medical check-up [Footnote: From a distance it did, anyway. Close to, no].

If you had to be in a room with that statue, you'd prefer it to be pitch dark.

Or, then again, perhaps not. A better option would be to put the thing in a darkened room while you had insomnia a thousand milles away, trying to forget what it looked like.

Parrot: "What the wossname is it?"
Rincewind: "It's their god."
Parrot: "Get away?"
Rincewind: "No, really. It's Quezovercoatl. Half man, half chicken, half jaguar, half serpent, half scorpion and half mad."
Parrot: "That makes a wossname total of three homicidal maniacs."

"Please don't leave me here," said the statue. "Please take me with you."

"Could be tricky, could be tricky," Rincewind said hurriedly, backing away. "It's not me, you understand, it's just that where I come from everyone has this racial prejudice thing against thirty-foot-high people with fangs and talons and necklaces of skulls all over them. I just think you'll have trouble fitting in."

"There!" said Rincewind to the parrot. "See? You think you know everything! He's here to be flayed alive."

"Every inch of skin removed to the accompanyment of exquisite pain," added the prisoner, helpfully.

Rincewind paused. He thought he knew the meaning of the word "exquisite," and it didn't seem to belong anywhere near "pain."

"That's the trouble with you people. You don't think of the Big Picture. I mean, look at the Tezumen. Gloomy, unimaginative, obsessive ... by now they could have invented a whole bureaucracy and taxation system that could have turned the minds of the continent to slag. Instead of which, they're just a bunch of second-rate axe-murderers. What a waste."

"You said we," he said. "Where's everyone else?"

"They got religion."

Rincewind looked up at the statue of Quezovercoatl. It took no imagination whatsoever to imagine what kind.

It had taken the Tezumen two storys, twenty years and ten tons of granite to explain what they intend to do to the Ruler of the World, but the result was, well, graphic. He would be left in no doubt that they were annoyed. He might even go so far as to deduce that they were quite vexed.

"You should see what they're doing to you on the next block," said the parrot smugly. "It'll turn your wossname."

Rincewind looked at the block. His wossname revolved.

[The Tezumen] had spears. They had exquisitely chipped obsidian spearheads, which, like their swords, were nowhere near as sophisticated as ordinary, coarse, inferior steel weapons. Was it better to know you were going to be skewered by delicate examples of genuine ethnic origin rather than nasty forge-made items hammered out by people not in contact with the cycles of nature?

The flat top of the truncated pyramid was in fact quite large, with plenty of room for statues, priests, slabs, gutters, knife-chipping production lines and all the other things the Tezumen needed for the bulk disposal of religion.

The prayers of most religions generally praise and thank the gods involved, either out of general piety or in the hope that he or she will take the hint and start acting responsibly.

Eric: "You wait till my mother finds out. My parents have got influence, you know."
Rincewind: "Oh, good. Why don't you tell the high priest that if he cuts your heart out she'll be right down to the school tomorrow to complain."

Rincewind: "You never should have wanted to be ruler of the world ... You can't expect people to be happy about seeing you. No-one ever is when the landlord turns up."
Eric: "But they're going to kill me!"
Rincewind: "It's just their way of saying that, metaphorically, they're fed up with waiting for you to repaint the place and see to the drains."

The Luggage had a straightforward way of dealing with things between it and its intended destination: it ignored them.

Eric: "I must say, if this is where the most beautiful woman in the world lives I don't think much of her choice of boodwah. You'd think she'd put a few cushions or something around the place."
Rincewind: "Boodwah?"
Eric: "She's bound to have one. I've read about 'em. She reclines on it."
Rincewind: "Tell me, have you ever felt the need to have a cold bath and a brisk run around the playing fields?"

Rincewind: "There's a door."
Eric: "Where does it go?"
Rincewind: "It stays where it is, I think."

Above them ... there was undoubtedly a huge wooden horse. More correctly, the rear of a huge wooden horse.

The builder could have put the exit hatch in a more dignified place, but for humorous reasons of his own had apparently decided not to.

Eric: "If you please, sir, I'm just a little lad led astray by bad companionship."
Rincewind: "Oh, thank you. You just accidentally drew a lot of occult circles, did you, and--"

He tried to remember what little he knew of classical history, but it was just a confusion of battles, one-eyed giants and women launching thousands of ships with their faces.

Eric: "We know what's going to happen! We can make a fortune!"
Rincewind: "How, exactly?"
Eric: "Well ... we could bet on horses, kind of thing."
Rincewind: "Great idea."
Eric: "Yes, and--"
Rincewind: "All we've got to do is escape, then find out if they have horse races here, and then really try hard to remember the names of the horses that won races in Tsort thousands of years ago."

About the only thing he could hope for, Rincewind decided, was finding da Quirm's Fountain of Youth and managing to stay alive for a few thousand years so he'd be ready to kill his own grandfather, which was the only aspect of time travel that had ever remotely appealed to him. He had always felt that his ancestors had it coming to them.

"Never mind about everyone else fighting valiantly to defend their city and womenfolk against the foe. You stop in here and guard us. That's the spirit. They'll probably put up a statue to you in the city square, if there's one left."

Rincewind: "Let's run away."
Eric: "Where to?"
Rincewind: "Don't you worry about to. In my experience that always takes care of itself. The important word is away."

The sergeant put on the poker face which has been handed down from NCO to NCO ever since one protoamphibian told another, lower ranking protoamphibian to muster a squad of newts and Take That Beach.

"She's thousands of years older than you! I mean, attraction of the mature woman, all right, but it'd never work out."

So Tsortean street life went on more or less as normal, with the citizens stepping around the occassional knots of fighting men or trying to sell them kebabs. Several of the more enterprising ones began dismantling the wooden horse for souvenirs.

Eric: "You didn't have to go and kick me!"
Rincewind: "You're quite right. It was an entirely voluntary act on my part."

It's funny how the people have always respected the kind of commander who comes up with strategies like "I want fifty thousand of you chappies to rush at the enemy," whereas the more thoughtful commanders who say things like "Why don't we build a damn great wooden horse and then nip in the back gate while they're all round the thing waiting for us to come out" are considered only one step above common oiks and not the kind of person you'd lend money to.

The consensus seemed to be that if really large numbers of men were sent to storm the mountain, then enough might survive the rocks to take the citadel. This is essentially the basis of all military thinking.

"I want to be a eunuch, sir," Eric added.

Rincewind's head turned as though it was being dragged.

"Why?" he said, and then came up with the obvious answer at the same time as Eric: "Because you get to work in a harem all day long," they chorused slowly.

Sergeant: "Don't you worry about the captain, sir. He's got the finest military brain on the continent."
Rincewind: "How do you know? Has anyone ever seen it?"

Eric: "Lavaelous was responsible for the fall of Tsort, on account of being so cunning. And then afterwards it took him ten years to get home and he had all sorts of adventures with temptresses and sirens and sensual witches."
Rincewind: "Well, I can see why you've been studying him. Ten years, eh? Where did he live?"
Eric: "About two hundred miles away."
Rincewind: "Kept getting lost, did he?"

"Sergeant?"

"Sir?"

"Guard this child."

"Yessir. Corporal?"

"Sarge?"

"Take care of the kid."

"Yes, sarge. Private Archeios?"

"Yes, corp," said the soldier, his voice gloomy with prescience.

"See to the sprog."

"We could tell him all kinds of stuff about his future," hissed Eric. "He had -- I mean, he will have -- all kinds of things happen to him. Shipwrecks and magic and all his crew turned into animals and stuff like that."

"Yes. We could say 'Walk home'," said Rincewind.

"Don't be silly," whispered Eric. "She looks like my mum. Elenor was much younger and was all--"

His voice gave out and he made several wavy motions with his hand, indicative of the shape of a woman who would probably be unable to keep her balance.

Lavaeolus turned and shrugged gloomily. "All right," he said. "Fine. QED. No problem. I wanted to leave home and spend ten years sitting in a swamp with a bunch of meat-headed morons. It wasn't as if I had anything important to do back home, just a little kingdom to rule, that sort of thing. O-kay."

"It's always the same with these hot-blooded types," said Rincewind. "They definitely go downhill at thirty-five."

"It's the pasta that does it," said the sergeant.

"But it said her face launched a thousand ships--"

"That's what you call metaphor," said Rincewind.

"Lying," the sergeant explained, kindly.

"The trouble is ... is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so."

Eric: "Where are we? Are we falling?"
Rincewind: "I don't think so. There's no rushing wind. You get a rushing wind when you're falling. Also your past life flashes before your eyes, and I haven't seen anything I recognise yet."

Rincewind: "So we're surrounded by absolutely nothing. There's a word for it. It's what you get when there's nothing left and everything's been used up."
Eric: "Yes. I think it's called the bill."

Astfgl: "Have you seen anybody?"
Death: YES.
Astfgl: "Who?"
Death: EVERYONE.

"When I was a lad it took days to make a universe. You could take a bit of pride in it. Now they just throw it together and it's back on the lorry and away."

Creator: "You know, people think it must all be very easy, creating. They think you just have to move on the face of the waters and wave your hands a bit. It's not like that at all."
Rincewind: "It isn't?"
Creator: "You soon run out of ideas for snowflakes, for example."

"Some people" -- and here the creator looked sharply at the unformed matter still streaming past -- "think it's enough to install a few basic physical formulas and then take the money and run. A billion years later you got leaks all over the sky, black holes the size of your head, and when you pray up to complain there's just a girl on the counter who says she don't know where the boss is."

"But listen," hissed Eric, "if he really is the creator of the world, that sandwich is a religious relic!"

"Gosh," said Rincewind weakly. He hadn't eaten for ages. He wondered what the penalty was for eating a venerated object. It was probably severe.

He also realised that the feeling of falling he had so recently learned to live with was one he was probably going to die with, too. As the world appeared beneath him it brought this aeon's special offer -- gravity, available in a choice of strengths from your nearest massive planetary body.

Eric: "What're quantum mechanics?"
Rincewind: "I don't know. People who repair quantums, I suppose."

"Most of history is pretty appaling, when you look hard at it. Or even not very hard."

Eric: "What shall I do?"
Rincewind: "Well, if you see anything crawl out of the sea and try to breathe, you could try telling it not to bother."

--At the Beginning of Time

The air had the clean, fresh smell of air that had yet to know the effusions of a forest floor or the ins and outs of a ruminant's digestive system.

[Rincewind had] looked Death in the face many times, or more precisely Death had looked him in the back of his rapidly-retreating head head many times...

If only there had been some mayonnaise, life might have turned out a whole lot different. More piquant, and perhaps with a little extra cream in it.

There was no doubt it was a forbidding door. It looked as though its designer had studied all the cell doors he could find and and had then gone away and produced a version for, as it were, full visceral orchestra.

Some ancient and probably fearful warning was etched over its crumbling arch, but it was destined to remain unread because over it someone else had pasted a bright red-and-white notice which read: "You Don't Have To Be 'Damned' To Work Here, But It Helps!!!"

"Multiple exclamation marks," he went on, shaking his head, "are a sure sign of a diseased mind."

"I'm not being picky, you understand," he said. "It's just that I thought you said you could get us back to Ankh. This isn't Ankh. I can tell by the little details, like the flickering red shadows and the distant screaming. In Ankh the screaming is usually much closer."

[Rincewind] wasn't, when you get right down to it, quite sure what it was that demons did to you. But he did know what humans did to you, and after a lifetime in Ankh-Morpork this place could turn out to be an improvement. Warmer, at any rate.

...it would be a lazy use of language to say that the thing door was a nightmare. ... This thing was the kind of terrifying thing that could only be created by someone sitting down and thinking terrible thoughts very clearly.

Nightmares are usually rather daft things and it's very hard to explain to a listener what was so dreadful about your socks coming alive or giant carrots jumping out of the hedgerows.

The badge said: "My name is Urglefloggah, Spawn of the Pit and Loathly Guardian of the Dread Portal: How May I Help You?"

"'Hi ... there'," it intoned, in the manner of one who has had the script patiently explained to him by someone with a red-hot branding iron.

"Don't blame me. If it was up to me it'd be the old burning thingys up the whatsit, toot sweet."

"And then there's the potted plants. Don't get me wrong, I like to see a bit of green around the place. Only some of the lads say these plants aren't real but what I say is, they must be, no-one in their right mind would make a plant that looks like dark green leather and smells like a dead sloth."

"The coffee machine, now, the coffee machine's a good one, I'll grant you. We only used to drown people in lakes of cat's pee, we didn't make them buy it by the cup."

Hell, it has been suggested, is other people.

This has always come as a bit of a surprise to many working demons, who had always thought that hell was sticking sharp things into people and pushing them into lakes of blood and so on.

...boredom is universal and Astfgl had achieved in Hell a particularly high brand of boredom which is like the kind of boredom you get which a) is costing you money, and b) is taking place while you should be having a good time.

Now and again screams of ennui rose from between the pot plants, but mainly there was the terrible numbing silence of the human brain being reduced to cream cheese from the inside out.

Rincewind: "What's going on? What's happening to him?"
Azaremoth: "I don't know what he done, but when I first come here his punishment was to be chained to that rock and every day an eagle would come down and peck his liver out. Bit of an old favourite, that one."
Rincewind: "It doesn't look as though it's attacking him now."
Azaremoth: "Nah. That's all changed. Now it flies down every day and tells him about its hernia operation. Now it's effective, I'll grant you, but it's not what I'd call torture."

Now [Rincewind] realised what made boredom so attractive. It was the knowledge that worse things, dangerously exciting things, were going on just around the corner and that you were well out of them.

[Rincewind] didn't like the sound of Him being back and Him being angry. Whenever something important enough to deserve capital letters was angry in the vicinity of Rincewind, it was usually angry with him.

"I never look back," said Rincewind firmly. "One of the first rules of running away is, never look back."

There was no way to describe how angry you can get running nearly twice the length of the space-time continuum, and the Luggage had been pretty annoyed to start with.

Possibly this made it angrier, although with the Luggage there wasn't any reliable way of telling because it spent all its time beyond, in a manner of speaking, the hostility event horizon.

Rincewind: "Fancy that. I never knew animals could go to Hell. Although I can quite see why they made an exception in this case."
Parrot: "Up yours, wizard!"

Expressions twitched as the [demon] lords made up their minds like a row of dominoes falling over. There were some things on which even they were united. No more policy statements, no more consultative documents, no more morale-boosting messages to all staff. This was Hell, but you had to draw the line somewhere.

It was the great hall. You could have built moon rockets in it. The kings of Hell might have heard of words like "subtlety" and "discretion", but they had also heard that if you had it you should flaunt it and reasoned that, if you didn't have it, you should flaunt it even more, and what they didn't have was good taste.

The Tezumen were happy. When no amount of worshipping caused the Luggage to come back and trample their enemies they poisoned all their priests and tried enlightened atheism instead, which still meant they could kill as many people as they liked but didn't have to get up so early to do it.

Now their long war was over and they could get on with the proper concern of civilised nations, which is to prepare for the next one.

...the damned had been given that insight which makes hardship so easy to bear -- the absolute and certain knowledge that things could be worse.

[Rincewind] looked down at the broad steps they were climbing. They were something of a novelty; each one was built out of large stone letters. The one he was just stepping on to, for example, read: I Meant It For The Best.

The next one was: I Thought You'd Like It.

Eric was standing on: For The Sake Of The Children.

"Weird, isn't it?" he said. "Why do it like this?"

"I think they're meant to be good intentions," said Rincewind. This was a road to Hell, and demons were, after all, traditionalists.