Reaper Man

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Death is missing -- presumed ... er ... gone.

Which leads to the kind of chaos you always get when an important public service is withdrawn.

Now Dead Rights activist Reg Shoe -- "Inside Every Living Person Is a Dead Person Waiting to Get Out" -- suddenly has more work than he had ever dreamed of. And newly deceased wizard Windle Poons wakes up in his coffin to find that he has come back as a corpse. And it's up to Windle and the members of Ankh-Morpork's rather unfrightening group of undead to save the world for the living.

Meanwhile, on a little farm far, far away, a tall, dark stranger is turning out to be really good with a scythe. There's a harvest to be got in. And when the scythe is on the other foot, Death is finding that life can be an awfully hard habit to break...

Quotes

There is a plain under a dim sky. It is covered with gentle rolling curves that might remind you of something else if you saw it from a long way away, and if you did see it from a long way away you'd be very glad that you were, in fact, a long way away.

"I remember," said one of the oldest mayflies, "when all this was fields, as far as you could see."

The younger mayflies looked around.

"It's still fields," one of them ventured, after a polite interval.

"I remember when it was better fields," said the old mayfly sharply.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fibre and, in some cases, backbone.

"We had proper glaciers in those days. Not like the ice you get now, here one season and gone the next."

-- Tree nostalgia

...in a general sort of way everyone knew they were going to die, even the common people. No one knew where you were before you were born, but when you were born, it wasn't long before you found you'd arrived with your return ticket already punched.

But wizards really knew [when they are going to die]. ... You generally got the premonition in time to return your library books and make sure your best suit was clean and borrow quite large sums of money from your friends.

Albert: "This isn't some sort of joke, is it?"
Death: I AM NOT KNOWN FOR MY SENSE OF FUN.

Death had tried fiery steeds and skeletal horses in the past, and found them impractical, especially the fiery ones, which tended to set light to their own bedding and stand in the middle of it looking embarassed.

Death: YOU FEAR TO DIE?
Albert: "It's not that I don't want ... I mean, I've always ... it's just that life is a habit that's hard to break..."

Albert: "You're really going to die?"
Death: YES. IT WILL BE A GREAT ADVENTURE.
Albert: "It will? You're not afraid?"
Death: I DO NOT KNOW HOW TO BE AFRAID.
Albert: "I could show you, if you like."

The wizards chatted with the forced jolliness of people who see one another all day and are now seeing one another all evening.

Poons: "I'm thinking of coming back as a woman. I'm looking forward to it. I think it might, mm, be jolly good fun."
Bursar: "Isn't there rather a lot of washing things? And making beds and cookery and all that sort of thing?"
Poons: "Not in the kind of, mm, life I had in mind."

After one hundred and thirty years, death probably had a certain attraction. You probably became quite interested in finding out what happened next.

Windle Poons made a speech. It was long and rambled and disjointed and went on about the good old days and he seemed to think that most of the people around him were people who had been, in fact, dead for about fifty years, but that didn't matter because you got into the habit of not listening to old Windle.

Windle was at the center of a very tactfully widening circle. No one was avoiding him, it was just that an apparent random Brownian motion was gently moving everyone away.

"That's the way I want to go," said the Dean.

"What, muttering about meat pies?" said the Bursar.

"No. Late."

Alone of all the creatures in the world, trolls believe that all living things go through Time backwards. If the past is visible and the future is hidden, they say, then it means you must be facing the wrong way. Everything alive is going through life back to front. And this is a very interesting idea, considering it was invented by a race who spend most of their time hitting one another on the head with rocks.

Wizards don't believe in gods in the same way that most people don't find it necessary to believe in, say, tables. ... either the gods are there whether you believe or not, or exist only as a function of that belief, so either way you might as well ignore the whole business and, as it were, eat off your knees.

But I'm not dead.

Not alive and not dead.

Sort of non-alive.

Or un-dead.

Oh dear...

[The Bursar] was certain he was anorectic, because every time he looked in a mirror he saw a fat man. It was the Archchancellor, standing behind him and shouting at him.

"Windle!" he said. "We thought you were dead!"

He had to admit it wasn't a very good line. You didn't put people on a slab with candles and lilies all round them because you think they've got a bit of a headache and want a nice lie down for half an hour.

Bursar: "You're an undead?"
Poons: "I didn't ask to be."

Well, it's true. There is life after death. And it's the same one. Just my luck.

"It's got to be Windle! It even talks like him!"

"It's not old Windle. Old Windle was a lot older!"

"Older? Older than dead?"

"Anyway, you can't trust those voodoo gods. Never trust a god who grins all the time and wears a top hat, that's my motto."

"...Is it? That's a funny motto."

He still looked dead. Pale face, red under the eyes. A dead body. Operating but still, basically, dead. Was that fair? Was that justice? Was that a proper reward for being a firm believer in reincarnation for almost 130 years? You came back as a corpse?

No wonder the undead were traditionally considered to be very angry.

Something wonderful, if you took the long view, was about to happen.

If you took the short or medium view, something terrible was about to happen.

It's like the difference between seeing a beautiful new star in the winter sky and actually being close to the supernova. It's the difference between the beauty of morning dew on a cobweb and actually being a fly.

...fundamental to the make-up of people like Mustrum Ridcully is an iron belief hat everyone else would like it too, if only they tried it.

...it took [Ridcully] several minutes to understand any new idea put to him, and this is a very valuable trait in a leader, because anything anyone is still trying to explain to you after two minutes is probably important and anything they give up after a mere minute or so is almost certainly something they shouldn't have been bothering you with in the first place.

Poons: "Oh. Hallo, Modo."
Modo: "I 'eard you was took dead, Mr. Poons."
Poons: "Er. Yes. I was."
Modo: "See you got over it, then."

"There's always a few undead around," said the Dean, doubtfully. "Vampires and zombies and banshees and so on."

"Yes, but they're more naturally undead," said the Archchancellor. "They know how to carry it off. They're born to it."

The post of Senior Wrangler was an unusual one, as was the name itself. In some centres of learning, the Senior Wrangler is a leading philosopher; in others, he's merely someone who looks after horses. The Senior Wrangler at Unseen University was a philosopher who looked like a horse, thus neatly encapsulating all descriptions.

Recent Runes: "People can be turned into zombies, you know. You don't even need magic. Just the liver of a certain rare fish and the extract of a particular kind of root. One spoonful, and when you wake up, you 're a zombie."
Senior Wrangler: "What type of fish?"
Recent Runes: "How should I know?"
Senior Wrangler: "How should anyone know, then? Did someone wake up one morning and say, hey, here's an idea, I'll just turn someone into a zombie, all I'll need is some rare fish liver and a piece of root, it's just a matter of finding the right one? You can see the queue outside the hut, can't you? No. 94, Red Stripefish liver and Maniac root... didn't work. No. 95, Spikefish liver and Dum-dum root... didn't work. No. 96--"

Ridcully: "You can't just abolish death, that's the point. Death can't die. That's like asking a scorpion to sting itself."
Senior Wrangler: "As a matter of fact, you can get a scorpion to--"
Ridcully: "Shut up."

...trying to keep down crime in Ankh-Morpork was like trying to keep down salt in the sea and the only recognition any keen guardian of the law was likely to get was the sort that goes, "Hey, that body in the gutter, isn't that old Sergeant Colon?"...

It is true that the undead cannot cross running water. However, the naturally turbid river Ankh, already heavy with the mud of the plains, does not, after having passed through the city (pop. 1,000,000), qualify under the term "running" or, for that matter, "water."

[Cut-Me-Own-Throat] Dibbler liked to describe himself as a merchant adventurer; everyone else liked to describe him as an itinerant pedlar whose moneymaking schemes were always let down by some small but vital flaw, such as trying to sell things he didn't own or which didn't work or, sometimes, didn't even exist.

Ankh-Morpork has always had a fine tradition of welcoming people of all races, colours and shapes, if they have money to spend and a return ticket.

For more than a century Windle Poons had lived inside the walls of Unseen University. In terms of accumulated years, he may have lived a long time. In terms of experience, he was about thirteen.

Poons passed goblin delicatessens and dwarf bars, from which came the sounds of singing and fighting, which dwarfs traditionally did at the same time.

Windle had hitherto seen trolls only in the more select parts of the city, where they moved with exaggerated caution in case they accidentally clubbed someone to death and ate them. In the Shades they strode, unafraid, heads held so high they very nearly rose above their shoulder blades.

[Poons] lurched into the building and creaked along the corridors until he reached his room. Someone else seemed to have moved some of their stuff into it, but Windle dealt with that by simply picking it all up in one sweep of his arms and throwing it out into the corridor.

They said that dying was just like going to sleep, although of course if you weren't careful bits of you could rot and drop off.

Ridcully: "Don't you feel anything?"
Senior Wrangler: "No sensation of crumbling into dust and blowing away?"
Poons: "My nose tends to peel if I'm out in the sun too long. I don't know if that's any help."

"If anyone's going to bury a wizard at a crossroads with a stake hammered through him, then wizards ought to do it. After all, we're his friends."

"What is this thing, anyway?" said the Dean, inspecting the implement in his hands.

"It's called a shovel," said the Senior Wrangler. "I've seen the gardeners use them. You stick the sharp end in the ground. Then it gets a bit technical."

It dawned on the sergeant that he had inadvertently placed himself centre stage in a drama involving hundreds of people, some of them wizards and all of them angry.

Poons: "If you just hand me the celery but think hammering a stake, that's probably sufficient."
Ridcully: "That's very decent of you. That shows a very proper spirit."
Senior Wrangler: "Espirit de corpse."

Flitworth: "And your first name? Don't tell me you haven't got one of those too. You've got to be a Bill or a Tom or a Bruce or one of those names."
Death: YES.
Flitworth: "What?"
Death: ONE OF THOSE.
Flitworth: "Which one?"
Death: ER. THE FIRST ONE?

Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler also never saw the sense in asking personal questions, at least insofar as they applied to him and were on the lines of "Are these things yours to sell?"

Mutton went well with Wow-Wow Sauce; on the night of Ridcully senior's death, for example, it had gone at least three miles.

The guard captain looked the Archchancellor up and down with the expression of one to whom the word "civilian" is pronounced in the same general tones as "cockroach."

Everything that exists, yearns to live. That's what the cycle of life is all about. That's the engine that drives the great biological pumps of evolution. Everything tries to inch its way up the tree, clawing or tentacling or sliming its way up to the next niche until it gets to the very top -- which, on the whole, never seems to have been worth all the effort.

The wizards held that, as servants of a higher truth, they were not subject to the mundane laws of the city.

The Patrician said that, indeed, this was the case, but they would bloody well pay their taxes like everyone else.

The wizards said that the University stood on magical ground and was therefore exempt from taxation and anyway you couldn't put a tax on knowledge.

The Patrician said you could. It was two hundred dollars per capita; if per capita was a problem, decapita could be arranged.

Many songs have been written about the bustling metropolis, the most famous of course being: "Ankh-Morpork! Ankh-Morpork! So good they named it Ankh-Morpork!", but others have included "Carry Me Away From Old Ankh-Morpork", "I Fear I'm Going Back to Ankh-Morpork", and the old favourite, "Ankh-Morpork Malady."

It wasn't that cobblestones didn't fly through the air, but usually someone had thrown them.

Mrs. Evadne Cake was a medium, verging on small.

Not many people who died in Ankh-Morpork showed much inclination to chat to their surviving relatives. Put as many mystical dimensions between you and them as possible, that was their motto.

Mrs. Cake could actually read the future in a bowl of porridge. [Footnote: It would say, for example, that you would shortly undergo a painful bowel movement.]

She had spent a lifetime dabbling in the spirit world, except that in Evadne's case dabbling wasn't really apposite. She wasn't the dabbling kind. It was more a case of stamping into the spirit world and demanding to see the manager.

It was clearly, even attractively female, in general shape, and wore a perfectly ordinary dress. It was also apparently suffering from a case of superfluous hair that not all the delicate pink razors in the world could erase. Also, teeth and fingernails were being worn long this season.

Poons: "Sorry about your lawn."
Modo: "Don't mention it, Mr. Poons."
Poons: "Did it take long to get it looking like that?"
Modo: "About five hundred years, I think."
Poons: "Gosh, I am sorry. I was aiming for the cellars, but I seem to have lost my bearings."
Modo: "Don't you worry about that, Mr. Poons. Everything's growing like crazy anyway. I'll fill it in this afternoon and put some more seed down and five hundred years will just zoom past, you wait and see."

Modo: "I heard you wasn't just dead but buried too."
Poons: "That's right."
Modo: "Can't keep a good man down, eh?"

His compost heaps heaved and fermented and glowed faintly in the dark, perhaps because of the mysterious and possibly illegal ingredients Modo fed them, although nothing had ever been proven and, anyway, no-one was about to dig into one to see what was in it.

"Credulous fools."

"Godless tinkerers."

"Gullible idiots!"

"Atheistic scum!"

"Servile morons!"

"Childish conjurors!"

"Bloodthirsty priests!"

"Interfering wizards!"

-- Wizards vs. Priests, round 1

Ridcully: "So ... how are things in the godbothering business?"
Chief Priest: "We do our humble best. How is the dangerous meddling with things man was not meant to understand?"
Ridcully: "Pretty fair."

Ridcully: "You know, I saw a suit of clothes run past on the way here? Two pairs of pants for seven dollars!"
Chief Priest: "Hmm. Did you see the label?"

Chief Priest: "You have ... ghastly Things from the Dungeon Dimensions and things, yes? Terrible hazards of your ungodly profession?"
Ridcully: "Yes."
Chief Priest: "We have someone called Mrs. Cake."

Chief Priest: "I suppose there's not some kind of magic you don't know about?"
Ridcully: "If there is, we don't know about it."

Thin, pale, and clad all in dusty black, the Patrician always put Ridcully in mind of a predatory flamingo, if you could find a flamingo that was black and had the patience of a rock.

Patrician: "I will see you gentlemen in the Oblong Office."
Chief Priest: "I, um, I believe there are a number of guards upstairs trying to free--"
Patrician: "I wouldn't dream of stopping them. It gives them something to do and makes them feel important. Otherwise they just have to stand around all day looking fierce and controlling their bladders."

Mrs. Cake bit her lip. Such a direct reply meant her spirit guide was worried. When he didn't have anything on his mind he spent five minutes talking about buffaloes and great white spirits, although if One-Man-Bucket had ever been near white spirit he'd drunk it and it was anyone's guess what he'd do to a buffalo.

She dropped the vase onto the stove. It smashed.

A moment later, there was a sound from the Other Side. If a discorporate spirit had hit another discorporate spirit with the ghost of a vase, it would have sounded just like that.

this is ghost talk, is it? feed the cat? whatever happened to, "I am very happy here, and waiting for you to join me"?

--listen, if anyone else joins us, we'll be standing on one another's heads--

All the religions had very strong views about talking to the dead. And so did Mrs. Cake. They held that it was sinful. Mrs. Cake held that it was only common courtesy.

...Ludmilla was a decent upright young woman for three weeks in every four and a perfectly well-behaved hairy wolf thing for the rest of the time.

"And you make sure you put your premonition on, mum. You know your eyesight isn't what it was."

"What do you want for breakfast?" said the old woman. "Not that it'll make any difference, 'cos it's porridge."

It wasn't even a one-horse town. If anyone had a horse, they'd have eaten it.

"You can't be looney and rich. You've got to be eccentric if you're rich."

The more mistakes he made, the more people liked him. So he propelled the little feathery darts with cold skill, never letting one drop within a foot of the targets they urged on him.

The Archchancellor was not the kind of man who takes a special pleasure in being brusque and rude to women. Or, to put it another way, he was brusque and rude to everyone, regardless of sex, which was equality of a sort.

Mrs. Cake: "I'm not your good woman!"
Ridcully: "And who are you, my good woman?"
Mrs. Cake: "Well, that's no way to talk to a respectable person."
Ridcully: "There's no need to be offended."
Mrs. Cake: "Oh blow, is that what I'm doin'?"
Ridcully: "Madam, why are you answering me before I've even said something?"
Mrs. Cake: "What?"
Ridcully: "What d'you mean?"

-- Conversation with a premonitionist

Belief is one of the most powerful organtic forces in the multiverse. It may not be able to move mountains, exactly. But it can create someone who can.

Belief sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter's wheel. That's how gods get created, for example. They clearly must be created by their own believers, because a brief resume of the lives of most gods suggests that their origins certainly couldn't be divine. They tend to do exactly the things people would do if only they could, especially when it comes to nymphs, golden showers, and the smiting of your enemies.

"Yeah, it's always the same," said Reg Shoe bitterly. "Once you're dead, people just don't want to know, right? They act as if you've got some horrible disease. Dying can happen to anyone, right?"

Windle realised that talking to Mr. Shoe was very much like talking to the Archchancellor. It didn't actually matter what you said, because he wasn't listening. Only in Mustrum Ridcully's case it was because he just wasn't bothering, while Reg Shoe was in fact supplying your side of the conversation somewhere inside his own head.

"I'm technically a wolf," said Lupine. "Ridiculous, really. Every full moon I turn into a wolf-man. The rest of the time I'm just a ... wolf."

"Huh! Priests!" said Mr. Shoe. "They're all the same. Always telling you that you're going to live again after you're dead, but you just try it and see the look on their faces!"

Poons: "And you're a vampire too, Mrs. Win ... I do beg your pardon ... Countess Notfaroutoe?"
Doreen: "My vord, yes."
Arthur: "By marriage."
Poons: "Can you do that? I thought you had to be bitten."
Arthur: "I don't see why I should have to go around biting my wife after thirty years of marriage, and that's flat."
Doreen: "Every voman should share her husband's hobbies. It iss vot keeps a marriage intervesting."

"I thought the turning-into-a-bat bit would be interesting, but the owls round here are murder."

Doreen, in addition to her here-one-minute-and-gone-the-next vampire accent, had decided to complement Arthur's evening dress with what she considered appropriate for a female vampire: figure-hugging black dress, long black hair cut into a widow's peak, and very pallid makeup. Nature had designed her to be small and plump with frizzy hair and a pasty complexion. There were definite signs of conflict.

Poons: "I thought bogeymen hid under things and, er, behind things and sort of leapt out at people."
Lupine: "He's all right on the hiding. I don't think he likes the leaping out."

[Re: "We Shall Overcome"] A song which, in various languages, is common on every known world in the multiverse. It is always sung by the same people, viz., the people who, when they grow up, will be the people who the next generation sing "We Shall Overcome" at.

"Have you ever seen a zombie try to play a guitar? It's helping him find his fingers afterwards that's so embarassing."

Lupine: "By the way, Sister Drull is a ghoul. If she offers you any of her meat patties, don't accept."
Poons: "Oh, dear. You mean she makes them out of human flesh?"
Lupine: "What? Oh. No. She just can't cook very well."

Windle was thinking: why me? Hundreds of people must die in this city every day. I bet they don't have this trouble. They just shut their eyes and wake up being born as someone else, or in some sort of heaven, or, I suppose, possibly some sort of hell. Or they go and feast with the gods in their hall, which has never seemed a particularly good idea -- gods are all right in their way, but not the kind of people a decent man would want to have a meal with. The Yen buddhists think you just become very rich. Some of the Klatchian religions say you go to a lovely garden full of young women, which doesn't sound very religious to me...

Windle found himself wondering how you applied for Klatchian nationality after death.

He'd need money, if he was moving out. He'd saved quite a lot over the years. Had he made a will? He'd been fairly confused the past ten years or so. He might have made one. Had he been confused enough to leave all his money to himself? He hoped so.

"Schleppel?" he said.

"That's right."

"The bogeyman?"

"That's right."

"Behind my door?"

"That's right."

"Why?"

"It's a friendly door."

"Dock-a-loodle-fod!"

-- Dyslexic roosters are a sad sight

Contrary to general belief, [Death] wasn't very familiar with funeral decor. Deaths didn't normally take place in tombs, except in rare and unfortunate cases. The open air, the bottoms of rivers, halfway down sharks, any amount of bedrooms, yes -- tombs, no.

[Death's] business was the separation of the wheatgerm of the soul from the chaff of thge mortal body, and that was usually concluded long before any of the rites associated with, when you got right down to it, a reverential form of garbage disposal.

"Don't often have occassion to open up the parlour these days."

NO.

"Not since I lost my dad."

For a moment Bill Door wondered if she'd lost the late Mr. Flitworth in the parlour. Perhaps he'd taken a wrong turn among the ornaments.

[Death had] never killed. He'd taken life, but only when it was finished with. There was a difference between theft and stealing by finding.

Bill Door had carefully ensured a local reputation as the worst bowman in the entire history of toxophily; it had never occurred to anyone that putting arrows through the hats of bystanders behind him must logically take a lot more skill than merely sending them through a quite large target a mere fifty yards away.

It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.

Bill Door made the mistake millions of people had tried before with small children in slightly similar circumstances. He resorted to reason.

Death knew that to tinker with the fate of one individual could destroy the whole world. He knew this. The knowledge was built into him.

To Bill Door, he realised, it was so much horse elbows.

A dog was watching him. It was a very large dog. In fact, the only reason it could be called a dog and not a wolf was that everyone knew you didn't get wolves in cities.

If someone had told me a month ago, Windle thought, that a few days after I died I'd be walking along the road followed by a bashful bogeyman hiding behind a door and accompanied by a kind of negative version of a werewolf... why, I probably would have laughed at them. After they'd repeated themselves a few times, of course. In a loud voice.

Miss Flitworth didn't hesitate for long. In seventy-five years she had dealt with wars, famine, innumerable sick animals, a couple of epidemics and thousands of tiny, everyday tragedies. A depressed skeleton wasn't even in the top ten Worst Things she had seen.

Death: SOMETIMES PEOPLE CHALLENGE ME TO A GAME. FOR THEIR LIVES, YOU KNOW.
Flitworth: "Do they ever win?"
Death: NO. LAST YEAR SOMEONE GOT THREE STREETS AND ALL THE UTILITIES.

On the fabled hidden continent of Xxxx, somewhere near the rim, there is a lost colony of wizards who wear corks around their pointy hats and live on nothing but prawns.

Bill Door was impressed. Miss Flitworth could actually give the word "revenue", which had two vowels and one diphthong, all the peremptoriness of the word "scum."

Flitworth: "In my father's day, any Reveenooer came around here prying around by himself, we used to tie weights to their feet and heave 'em into the pond."
Death: BUT THE POND IS ONLY A FEW INCHES DEEP, MISS FLITWORTH.
Flitworth: "Yeah, but it was fun watching 'em find out."

"I don't hold with all that stuff with cards and trumpets and Oo-jar boards, mind you. An' I think ectoplasm's disgusting. Oi won't have it in the 'ouse. Oi won't. You can't get it out of the carpets, you know. Not even with vinegar."

Mrs. Cake: "It's unnatural, the supernatural. I won't have it."
Poons: "Um. There are those who might think that being a medium is a bit ... you know ... supernatural?"
Mrs. Cake: "What? What? Nothing supernatural about dead people. Load of nonsense. Everyone dies sooner or later."

"Why does everyone run towards a blood-curdling scream?" mumbled the Senior Wrangler. "It's contrary to all sense."

Bursar: "It can't be intelligent, can it?"
Dean: "All it's doing is moving around slowly and eating things."
Ridcully: "Put a pointy hat on it and it'd be a faculty member."

"There are times when--" Ridcully began, and then the compost heap exploded.

It wasn't a bang or a boom. It was the dampest, most corpulent eruption in the history of terminal flatulence.

Dean: "Yeah! We're mean! Yeah! Are we mean?"
Ridcully: "Are we mean?"
Recent Runes: "Er. I'm feeling reasonably mean."
Bursar: "I'm definitely very mean, I think. It's having no boots that does it."
Wrangler: "I'll be mean if everyone else is."

Bill Door regarded [the machine] with polite incomprehension. It looked, at first sight, like a portable windmill that had been attacked by an enormous insect, and at second sight like a touring torture chamber for an Inquisition that wanted to get out and about a bit and enjoy the fresh air.

A bodiless voice quavered, greetings, pale face, from the happy hunting ground--

"You stop that," said Mrs. Cake. "Everyone knows you got run over by a cart in Treacle Street because you was drunk, One-Man-Bucket."

s'not my fault. not my fault. is it my fault my great-granddad moved here? by rights I should have been mauled to death by a mountain lion or a giant mammoth or something. I bin denied my deathright.

Mrs. Cake: "Mr. Poons here wants to ask you a question, One-Man-Bucket."
One-Man-Bucket: she is happy here and waiting for you to join her.
Poons: "Who is?"
One-Man-Bucket: who would you like?

I wanted to stay in the spirit world. or even wine and beer.

It was considered bad form to use magic against fellow wizards, and using it against civilians was unsporting.

"I wonder, could you stop trying to twist my head off?"

Lupine was having his head cradled in Ludmilla's lap. He had lost a tooth, and his fur was a mess. He opened one eye and fixed Windle with a conspiratorial yellow stare while his ears were stroked. There's a lucky dog, thought Windle, who's going to push his luck and hold up a paw and whine.

"I can see it clear! I can see it clear!" screamed the Dean.

"Don't! You might hit the Bursar!" bellowed Ridcully. "You might damage University property!"

"You stupid--!" he screamed.

The word he uttered was unfamiliar to those wizards who had not had his robust country upbringing and knew nothing of the finer points of animal husbandry.

People never told the Archchancellor to shut up. Shutting up was something that happened to other people. He shut up out of shock.

Senior Wrangler: "Can't you say something else?"
Ridcully: "Like what?"
Senior Wrangler: "Like ... oh ... like ... darn."
Ridcully: "Darn?"
Senior Wrangler: "Yes, or maybe poot."
Ridcully: "Poot? You want me to say poot?"
Bursar: "Mrs. Whitlow the housekeeper always says 'Sugar!' when she drops something."
Ridcully: "She may say sugar, but what she means is shi-- Oh, darn..."

"Darn darn darn. Sugar sugar sugar. Pooty pootity poot."

Death: ALSO SPIGOT GAVE ME A HUMOROUS APPLE JUICE FERMENTED DRINK BECAUSE OF THE HEAT AND NOW I FEEL ILL.
Flitworth: "I ain't surprised. He makes it up in the woods. Apple isn't the half of it."
Death: I HAVE NEVER FELT ILL BEFORE. OR TIRED.
Flitworth: "It's all part of being alive."
Death: HOW DO HUMANS STAND IT?
Flitworth: "Well, fermented apple juice can help."

People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and in all that time never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.

Flitworth: "How come you've got [the lifetimer]? It's upstairs! She was holding it like-- like someone holds something very tightly."
Death: SHE STILL IS. BUT IT IS ALSO HERE. OR ANYWHERE. IT IS ONLY A METAPHOR. AFTER ALL.
Flitworth: "What she's holding looks real enough."
Death: JUST BECAUSE SOMETHING IS A METAPHOR DOESN'T MEAN IT CAN'T BE REAL.

THERE IS A SAYING: YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU?

"Yes."

HOW MANY PEOPLE HAVE SERIOUSLY BELIEVED IT?

Vermine are small black-and-white rodents found in the Ramtop Mountains. They are ancestors of the lemming, which as is well known throws itself over cliffs and drowns in lakes on a regular basis. Vermine used to do that, too. The point is, though, that dead animals don't breed, and over the millenia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another's gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.

The Dean himself didn't know when he'd been happier. For sixty years he'd been obeying all the self-regulating rules of wizardry, and suddenly he was having the time of his life. He'd never realized that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.

Ridcully: "Know what this reminds me of?"
Senior Wrangler: "Do tell."
Ridcully: "Salmon run."
Senior Wrangler: "What?"
Ridcully: "Not in the Ankh, of course. I don't reckon a salmon could get upstream in our river--"
Senior Wrangler: "Unless it walked."

"Okay, lads? We want to do them all as much damage as possible. Remember -- wild, uncontrolled bursts..."

The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

THE KIND OF DEATH WHO POSES AGAINST THE SKYLINE AND GETS LIT UP BY LIGHTNING FLASHES, said Bill Door, disapprovingly, DOESN'T TURN UP AT FIVE-AND-TWENTY PAST ELEVEN IF HE CAN POSSIBLY TURN UP AT MIDNIGHT.

"We call that Mother Carey's Fire," said Miss Flitworth. "It's an omen."

AN OMEN OF WHAT?

"What? Oh, don't ask me. Just an omen, I suppose. Just basic omenery."

IT'S A SKELETAL STEED. IMPRESSIVE BUT IMPRACTICAL. I HAD ONE ONCE BUT THE HEAD FELL OFF.

Flitworth: "That's not fair, you know. If we knew when we were going to die, people would lead better lives."
Death: IF PEOPLE KNEW WHEN THEY WERE GOING TO DIE, I THINK THEY PROBABLY WOULDN'T LIVE AT ALL.

"Have you got any last words?"

YES. I DON'T WANT TO GO.

"Well. Succinct, anyway."

Windle knew his fellow citizens. They'd go to look at anything. They were suckers for anything written down with more than one exclamation mark after it.

Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.

Arthur's back ached from digging the moat. And that was another things your posh vampire didn't have to worry about. The moat came with the job, style of thing. And it went all the way round, because other vampires didn't have the street out in front of them and old Mrs. Pivey complaining on one side and a family of trolls Doreen wasn't speaking to on the other and therefore they didn't end up with a moat that just went across the back yard. Arthur kept falling in it.

Ludmilla: "There's Mr. Dibbler."
Poons: "What's he selling this time?"
Ludmilla: "I don't think he's trying to sell anything, Mr. Poons."
Poons: "It's that bad? Then we're probably in lots of trouble."

He was wearing a collapsible opera hat, which was fine on the collapsible part but regrettably lacking in hatness, so that Arthur appeared to be looking at the world from under a concertina.

[Arthur] spread the cloak dramatically. There was a brief, implosive noise, and a small fat bat hung in the air. It looked down, gave an angry squeak, and nosedived into the soil.

"The music doesn't affect you?"

"It puts my teeth on edge is what it does," said Arthur. "Which is not a good thing for a vampire, I prob'ly don't have to tell you."

"Do you think it might be a good idea to go back outside?" said Doreen.

"What good would that do?" said Windle.

"Well, it'd get us out of here."

"Can't you wake them up?"

"Light a feather under their nose," Doreen volunteered.

"I don't think that will work," said Windle. He based the statement on the fact that Reg Shoe was very nearly under their noses, and anyone whose nasal equipment failed to register Mr. Shoe would certainly not react to a mere burning feather. Or a heavy weight dropped from a great height, if it came to that.

"Me? But I can't stand heights!"

"I thought you could turn into a bat?"

"Yeah, but a very nervous one!"

It is traditional, when loading wire trolleys, to put the most fragile items at the bottom.

There was a jangle, a clatter, and then the last isolated boing, which is the audible equivalent of the famous pair of smoking boots.

People were being ministered to, but nobody was paying him any attention. Well, if there was ministering going on, he was damn well going to get ministered to as well.

"Yeah? Yeah? And what do you know about military tactics? You can't even say 'yo' properly!"

"You can't magic the place to bits with one of your wizards in there!"

"What, dead Windle Poons?"

"Yes!"

"But he's dead," said Ridcully. "Isn't he? He said he was."

"Ha!" said someone who had much less skin than Ridcully would have liked him to have. "That's typical. That's naked vitalism, that is. I bet they'd rescue someone in there if they happened to be alive."

Ridcully was simple-minded. This doesn't mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges.

He concentrated on the single main fact. Someone who was technically a wizard was in trouble. He could relate to that. It struck a chord. The whole dead-or-alive business could wait.

Ridcully: "Dean!"
Dean: "Yo!"
Ridcully: "We're just going to go in there to get Windle out."
Dean: "Yo!"
Wrangler: "What? You must be out of your mind!"
Ridcully: "Remember that I am your Archchancellor."
Wrangler: "Then you must be out of your mind, Archchancellor!"

"Tell me," Ludmilla whispered to Ridcully, "is this how wizards usually behave?"

"The Senior Wrangler is an amazingly fine example," said Ridcully. "Got the same urgent grasp of reality as a cardboard cutout. Proud to have him on the team."

"Oook."

"You? We can't take you," said the Dean, glaring at the Librarian. "You don't know a thing about guerrilla warfare."

"Oook!" said the Librarian, and made a surprisingly comprehensive gesture to indicate that, on the other hand, what he didn't know about orangutan warfare could be written on the very small pounded-up remains of, for example, the Dean.

Dean: "That's what the warriors on the Counterweight Continent do before they go into battle. And you have to shout -- er, bonsai. Yes. Bonsai!"
Wrangler: "I thought that meant chopping bits off trees to make them small."
Dean: "No, it's definitely got to be bonsai. On account of it all being part of bushido. Like ... small trees. Bush-i-do. Yeah. Makes sense, when you think about it."

No naked little men sat on the summit dispensing wisdom, because the first thing the truly wise man works out is that sitting around on mountaintops gives you not only hemorrhoids but frostbitten hemorrhoids.

Occassionally people would climb the mountain and add a stone or two to the cairn at the top, if only to prove that there is nothing really damn stupid that humans won't do.

Ridcully: "What was it?"
Poons: "He's a bogeyman."
Ridcully: "I thought you only get them in closets and things?"
Reg Shoe: "He's come out of the closet. And he's found himself."

"What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?"

"Please, Miss Flitworth, there's a skeleton of a horse walking around in the barn! It's eating hay!"

"How?"

"And it's all falling through!"

"Really? We'll keep it, then. At least it'll be cheap to feed."

Mrs. Cake always assumed that an invitation to Ludmilla was an invitation to Ludmilla's mother as well. Mothers like her exist everywhere, and apparently nothing can be done about them.

"Sorry. Don't mind me. I'd forget my own head if it wasn't sewn on."

heh heh, you've caused some real trouble there! you know what's going to happen next full moon?

"Yes, I do. And I think, somehow, that they do too."

but he'll become a wolfman.

"Yes. And she'll become a wolfwoman."

all right, but what kind of relationship can people have one week in four?

"Maybe at least as good a chance of happiness as most people get."

In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away -- until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone's life, they say, is only tthe core of actual existence.

In front of him, stacked up with impromptu bookmarks in their pages, were the lives of some of the Discworld's greates lovers. [Footnote: The most enthusiastic of these was the small but persistent and incredibly successful Casaunder the Dwarf, a name mentioned with respect and awe wherever stepladder owners are gathered together.]

There were only seconds left. Seconds had meant a lot to Bill Door, because he'd had a limited supply. They meant nothing at all to Death, who'd never had any.

Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.

THERE IS NO HOPE BUT US. THERE IS NO MERCY BUT US. THERE IS NO JUSTICE. THERE IS JUST US.

The dark, sad face filled the sky.

ALL THINGS THAT ARE, ARE OURS. BUT WE MUST CARE. FOR IF WE DO NOT CARE, WE DO NOT EXIST. IF WE DO NOT EXIST, THEN THERE IS NOTHING BUT BLIND OBLIVION.

AND EVEN BLIND OBLIVION MUST END SOME DAY.

LORD, WHAT CAN THE HARVEST HOPE FOR, IF NOT FOR THE CARE OF THE REAPER MAN?

"That's our De Luxe assortment," said the lady in the chocolate shop. It was such a high-class establishment that it sold, not sweets, but confectionery -- often in the form of individual gold-wrapped swirly things that made even larger holes in a bank balance than they did in a tooth.

On a lid like a satin cushion it had a picture of a couple of hopelessly cross-eyed kittens looking out of a boot.

WHAT FOR IS THIS BOX PADDED? IS IT TO BE SAT ON? CAN IT BE THAT IT IS CAT-FLAVOURED?

"This [diamond]," said the merchant, "is a particularly excellent stone, don't you think? Note the fire, the exceptional--"

HOW FRIENDLY IS IT?

The merchant hesitated. He knew about carats, about adamantine lustre, about "water" and "make" and "fire", but he'd never before been called upon to judge gems in terms of general affability.

One of the nice things about being a priest in the Lost Jewelled Temple of Doom of Offler the Crocodile God was that you got to go home early most afternoons. This was because it was lost. Most worshippers never found their way there. They were the lucky ones.

"Chap with a whip got as far as the big sharp spikes last week," said the low priest.

The priests looked into one another's horrified faces.

"Hey," said the one who was not High. "You don't think it could be--"

"Here? Oh, come on. We're in the middle of a godsdamn jungle." The High Priest tried to smile. "There's no way it could be--"

The footsteps got nearer.

The priests clutched at one another in terror.

"Mrs. Cake!"

"Hey, can I be High Priest tomorrow?"

"It's not your turn until Thursday."

"That's not my dress. It's got all glitter on it."

Death sighed. The great lovers of history had never encountered Miss Flitworth. Casanunder would have handed in his stepladder.

YOU ARE AS OLD AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.

"Huh! Yah? Really? That's the kind of stupid thing people always say. They always say, My word, you're looking well. They say, There's life inthe old dog yet. Many a good tune played on an old fiddle. That kind of stuff. It's all stupid. As if being old was some kind of thing you should be glad about! As if being philosophical about it will earn you marks! My headknows how to think young, but my knees aren't that good at it. Or my back. Or my teeth. Try telling my knees they're as old as they think they are and see what good it does you. Or them."

There were trestle tables covered with the kind of food that's normally associated with the word "repast" -- pork pies like varnished military fortifications, vats of demonical pickled onions, jacket potatoes wallowing in a cholesterol ocean of melted butter.

"I take it you do dance, Mr. Bill Door?"

FAMED FOR IT, MISS FLITWORTH.

There were the old favorites -- the square dances, the reels, the whirling, intricate measures which, if the dancers had carried lights, would have traced out topological complexities beyond the reach of ordinary physics, and the sort of dances that lead perfectly sane people to shout out things like "Do-si-do!" and "Och-aye!" without feeling massively ashamed for quite a long time.

"What's this [dance] called?"

TANGO.

"Can you get put in prison for it?"

I DON'T BELIEVE SO.

"Amazing."

YOU KNOW WHEN YOU SAID THAT SEEING ME GAVE YOU QUITE A START?

"Yes?"

I GAVE YOU QUITE A STOP.

Flitworth: "I see you made a few changes, Bill Door."
Death: NO. IT IS LIFE THAT MAKES MANY CHANGES.

"When I see what life does to people, you know, you don't seem so bad."

The landscape was snow and green ice on broken mountains. These weren't old mountains, worn down by time and weather and full of gentle ski slopes, but young, sulky, adolescent mountains. They held secret ravines and merciless crevices. One yodel out of place would attract, not the jolly echo of a lonely goatherd, but fifty tons of express-delivery snow.

There was an old legend ... what was it, now? If you threw a coin into the Ankh from the Brass Bridge you'd be sure to return? Or was it if you just threw up into the Ankh? Probably the former. Most of the citizens, if they dropped a coin into the river, would be sure to come back if only to look for the coin.

"I'm sure we citizens can sleep safely in one another's beds knowing that no-one can make off with a five-thousand-ton bridge overnight," said Windle.

Unlike Modo the dwarf, Sergeant Colon did know the meaning of the word "irony". He thought it meant "sort of like iron".

"I've met people I never even knew existed. I've done all sorts of things. I've really got to know who Windle Poons is."

WHO IS HE. THEN?

"Windle Poons."

I CAN SEE WHERE THAT MUST HAVE COME AS A SHOCK.

"Well, yes."

ALL THESE YEARS AND YOU NEVER SUSPECTED.

"You know," said Windle, "it's a wonderful afterlife."

Death stood alone, watching the wheat dance in the wind. Of course, it was only a metaphor. People were more than corn. They whirled through tiny crowded lives, driven literally by clock work, filling their days from edge to edge with the sheer effort of living. And all lives were exactly the same length. Even the very long and very short ones. From the point of view of eternity, anyway.

Somewhere, the tiny voice of Bill Door said: from the point of view of the owner, longer ones are best.

I KNEW I'D MISSED SOMEONE.

The Death of Rats nodded. SQUEAK?

Death shook his head.

NO, I CAN'T LET YOU REMAIN, he said. IT'S NOT AS THOUGH I'M RUNNING A FRANCHISE OR SOMETHING.

NO, YOU CAN'T RIDE A CAT. WHO EVER HEARD OF THE DEATH OF RATS RIDING A CAT? THE DEATH OF RATS WOULD RIDE SOME KIND OF DOG.