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.It’d just be, well.bits.Certainly, you could make a scythe out of them, but you could probably do that with the dust and ashes if you knew how to do it.Ned Simnel was quite pleased with this line of argument.And, after all.Bill Door hadn’t even asked for proof that the thing had been.er, killed.He took sight carefully and then used the scythe to chop the end off the anvil.Uncanny.Total sharpness.He gave in.It was unfair.You couldn’t ask someone like him to destroy something like this.It was a work of art.It was better than that.It was a work of craft.He walked across the room to a stack of timber and thrust the scythe well out of the way behind the heap.There was a brief, punctured squeak.Anyway, it would be all right.He’d give Bill his farthing back in the morning.The Death of Rats materialised behind the heap in the forge, and trudged to the sad little heap of fur that had been a rat that got in the way of the scythe.Its ghost was standing beside it, looking apprehensive.It didn’t seem very pleased to see him.‘Squeak? Squeak?’SQUEAK.the Death of Rats explained.‘Squeak?’SQUEAK, the Death of Rats confirmed.‘[Preen whiskers] [twitch nose]?’The Death of Rats shook its head.197SQUEAK.The rat was crestfallen.The Death of Rats laid a bony but not entirely unkind paw on its shoulder.Squeak.Tile rat nodded sadly.It had been a good life in the forge.Ned’s housekeeping was almost non-existent, and he was probably the world champion absent?minded-leaver of unfinished sandwiches.It shrugged, and trooped after the small robed figure.It wasn’t as if it had any choice.People were streaming through the streets.Most of them were chasing trolleys.Most of the trolleys were full of whatever people had found a trolley useful to carry - firewood, children, shopping.And they were no longer dodging, but moving blindly, all in the same direction.You could stop a trolley by turning it over, when its wheels spun madly and uselessly.The wizards saw a number of enthusiastic individuals trying to smash them, but the trolleys were practically indestructible - they bent but didn’t break, and if they had even one wheel left they’d make a valiant attempt to keep going.‘Look at that one!’ said the Archchancellor.‘It’s got my laundry in it! My actual laundry! Darn that for a lark!’He pushed his way through the crowds and rammed his staff into the trolley’s wheels, toppling it over.‘We can’t get a clear shot at anything with all these civilians around,’ complained the Dean.‘There’s hundreds of trolleys!’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.‘It’s just like vermine! * Get away from me, you - you basket!’* 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 the198He flailed at an importunate trolley with his staff.The tide of wheeled baskets was flowing out of the city.The struggling humans gradually dropped out or fell under the wobbling wheels.Only the wizards stayed in the flowing tide, shouting at one another and attacking the silvery swarm with their staves.It wasn’t that magic didn’t work.It worked quite well.A good zap could turn a trolley into a thousand intricate little wire puzzles.But what good did that do? A moment later two others would trundle over their stricken sibling.Around the Dean trolleys were being splashed into metal droplets.‘He’s really getting the hang of it, isn’t he?’ said the Senior Wrangler, as he and the Bursar levered yet another basket on to its back.‘He’s certainly saying Yo a lot, ‘ said the Bursar.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 realised that, deep down inside, what he really wanted to do was make things go splat.Fire leapt from the tip of his staff.Handles and bits of wire and pathetically spinning wheels tinkled down around him.And what made it even better was that there was no end to the targets.A second wave of trolleys, crammed into a tighter space, was trying to advance over the tops of those still in actual contact with the ground.It wasn’t working, but they were trying anyway.And trying desperately, because amillennia 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 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]