+++ This chapter could've been named "Meanwhile, back in Ankh-Morpork…"+++
Chapter 3: Wood and silver
Ridcully looked in at the university dining room and saw the Senior Wrangler napping with the tablecloth tucked under his chin. The Senior Wrangler had dropped off after lunch's third course, awakened briefly and decided there was no point in leaving before tea.
"Faculty meeting!" Ridcully shouted.
The Senior Wrangler jerked awake, jumped to his feet and four silver place settings crashed to the ground.
"Yes, Archchancellor?" he said as he disentangled himself from the tablecloth.
"Faculty meeting, I said. Where's the Dean?"
"He's seeing to the Bursar with Runes and Stibbons."
Ridcully pointed dramatically at the ceiling. "To the Bursar!"
The wizards rushed as fast as academics accustomed to four and a half meals a day could manage. The Senior Wrangler took a breather on the first floor landing but Ridcully forged on. He was shouting before he reached the Bursar's office.
"Dean! Runes! Stibbons! Faculty meeting!"
Ponder Stibbons, Unseen University's youngest, brightest and thinnest faculty wizard, slipped out of the Bursar's office, a finger to his lips.
"Archchancellor, the Bursar's just got to sleep. He's had a hard time of it today…"
"Nonsense!"
Ridcully pushed past and found the Dean's significant girth blocking the view of the Bursar's couch. "Did you hear, Dean? Faculty meeting!"
"We can't have a meeting with the Bursar in this condition," said the Dean.
"Eh? What's wrong with him? Too much napping in the middle of the day, I'll wager." Ridcully looked down at the reclining Bursar, whose eyes were closed. His usual daft smile was noticeably absent from his face.
The Lecturer in Recent Runes held up a glass bottle full of small green pills. "It's these, Archchancellor."
"Dried frog pills. What of it? Bursar should be saner than us now."
"Well, sir, the usual dosage is two pills every four hours."
"And?"
"And he's had four pills. In the past hour. That we know of. "
The Archchancellor's eyes swivelled onto the Dean. "And how did this happen, Dean?"
"Why do you always assume it was me who did something wrong?"
"Answer my question."
The Dean's bottom lip stuck out. "How was I supposed to know that Stibbons had already given him some?" he complained. "I wasn't there, you know. All I knew was that the Bursar was a bit… flightier than usual. A lot more, really. And I thought, no harm giving him a few more pills. I acted out of pure disinterest."
Ponder opened his mouth to speak but Ridcully was faster.
"Until further notice, no one, and I mean no one, is to give dried frog pills to the Bursar. Is that clear?" The wizards glared at one another and nodded. "Right. Now, where's the Chair? He should be at the meeting too."
The senior wizards shuffled their feet and gazed at various points on the Bursar's calming cream-coloured office walls. Ponder sighed because he assumed he would be the one to impart bad news about the Chair of Indefinite Studies. After a deep breath, he let the lemming out of the pillowcase.*
"He's meeting with students, Archchancellor," he said.
"He's what?"
"I think he's holding a seminar."
For a moment Ridcully was speechless. He often boasted that during his 50-year career at Unseen University, he could count on one hand the number of times he had met with students. If you asked him, once per decade was once too much.
He made little choking noises, then the blocked passages in his throat finally cleared.
"A seminar?" he said, the colour rising on his face. "With students?"
"Yes, Archchancellor."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did anybody give him dried frog pills?"
"I think he's trying to impress Mrs. Whitlow," said the Senior Wrangler petulantly. Mrs. Whitlow was the robust, and some wizards had noticed, busty university housekeeper. The Senior Wrangler had a secret, vivid fantasy world involving him, Mrs. Whitlow, a pair of coconuts and a cream torte.
"She did say that it's a shame the students spend so little time with the faculty," said the Dean.
"When did she say that?" said Ridcully.
"Last Tuesday. She helped serve the cheese course."
"Was I there?"
"Yes, Archchancellor."
"Why didn't I hear her, then?"
Ponder was ready with a reply when he caught the looks of the other wizards. There was no point informing Ridcully that he'd snored through the cheese and salad courses. The Archchancellor always denied that kind of thing.
"All right, then," Ridcully said. "Mister Stibbons, you fetch the Chair, everybody get your staffs, and we'll meet in the main hall in five minutes. Right? Right!"
The Bursar suddenly opened his eyes.
"Hello, Archchancellor," he said.
"Good to see you back with us, Bursar. Coming to the faculty meeting?"
"Certainly, sir."
The Bursar got to his feet, fetched a notebook and pencil and calmly walked out of his office. The wizards stared after him. The cuckoo clock the faculty had given him on his last birthday ticked away the minutes. The Dean finally broke the silence.
"Seems rather eerie when he's sane, doesn't it?" he said.
The wizards fell silent again. They'd grown so accustomed to the Bursar's harmless insanity that they hesitated to admit that they preferred him that way. He was cheap entertainment and he didn't check the faculty expenditures so closely.
Ridcully finally reached into one of the compartments in his hat and pulled out a glass bottle. There were only a few mouthfuls of golden brown liquid left in it.
"Senior Wrangler, you better fetch another brandy from the cellar," he said. "And bring some glasses."
Ponder rolled his eyes. "Of course mixing dried frog pills with alcohol will have no detrimental effects on the Bursar," he said. He'd momentarily forgotten that Ridcully thought sarcasm was a very large canyon in the east.
"There you are, gentleman," said the Archchancellor. "You heard it from Mister Stibbons. The Bursar will be back to his old self after a little tipple. Now let's get on with it. I've got an important announcement to make."
Ten minutes later, the wizards had assembled in the main hall, staffs in hand. The Bursar held his pencil and notebook. He looked ready to be politely interested in anything that might be said. The Senior Wrangler offered him a glass of brandy which he obediently drank up.
"Did you win the chess game, Archchancellor?" Ponder asked.
Ridcully beamed. "You could say that."
"You could?" Ponder knew the Patrician was the best chess player in the city and he'd been keeping track of the numbers of Ponce Featherhew Day wins and loses. He had expected the Archchancellor to return to the university in a foul mood that he'd spread around by asking faculty members what it is they do all day. Ridcully called it Taking an Interest.
"You could say, most definitely, that I did, in fact, win the game," the Archchancellor repeated carefully. He stared hard at the senior faculty, which finally took the hint.
"Well done, Mustrum," said the Dean.
"Good show, Archchancellor," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies, who'd been reprimanded for the seminar. He felt he had some ground to make up.
The doors to the hall swung open suddenly. Every wizard except Ridcully slowly took one step away from his colleagues.
The Librarian stood in the doorway with a loaded 500-pound crossbow on each hip. He was grinning.
"I do apologize for that little monkey joke I told last week," the Lecturer in Recent Runes said hastily. "No harm in a joke, what?"
"Ah, Librarian," said Ridcully. "Bring those over here. I want them in reach. That's a good man."
"Ook."
"--ape."
As soon as the Librarian had set down the crossbows, the wizards relaxed.
"What do you need those for, Mustrum?" asked the Dean.
"In case he comes back swinging, Dean."
"Who?"
Ridcully took out his tobacco pouch. "We now come to the reason for this faculty meeting."
"I've got some already rolled if you want them, Archchancellor," said the Chair, who was determined to butter up Ridcully in order to get back his croquet privileges.**
"No, no," Ridcully said. "I was looking for this. Gentleman..." He dusted off a few loose tobacco leaves and held up the black chess figure with a flourish.
"You stole a chess piece," said the Senior Wrangler in the tone of all tattletales everywhere. "The Patrician won't like that one bit."
"Look closer, Senior Wrangler."
The wizards gathered around and peered at the figure. There was a deep silence. The Bursar, who was feeling much better after his drink, wandered over to the crossbows.
"You didn't, Archchancellor," said the Senior Wrangler.
"I certainly did."
Ponder put a hand over his eyes. The Lecturer in Recent Runes gingerly touched the black knight and pulled his hand away as if burned.
"What did you use?" he asked.
Ridcully drew himself up and thrust out his chest proudly. He would've stuck his thumbs in his suspenders if wizards needed anything but their stomachs to keep up their trousers.
"Dean, do you remember when you told me that Croggly's Sub-dimensional Discombobulator required weeks of careful mental preparation, intensive study of Croggly's obscure script and the consumption of two bottles of 12-year-old scotch?"
"No, but that sounds like something I'd say."
"Well," said Ridcully, "I did it like this." He snapped his fingers.
The senior faculty gasped.
"Bra-vo, Archchancellor," said the Dean.
They all looked at the chess piece with renewed awe. Except for Ponder, whose eyes might have bulged out of their sockets if he hadn't been wearing glasses.
"But…but... It's the Patrician!"
"That's right, Mister Stibbons. Well observed, there." Ridcully set the chess piece on a table.
"But why?"
"He was being difficult."
"He's always difficult. That's his job!"
"You know, the negativity around here is really getting on my nerves," Ridcully said. "Shall we start those daily affirmations again? At dawn? In the quadrangle?"
The rest of the wizards glared at Ponder, who fell silent. He could handle being up at dawn. Sometimes with his work on Hex***, he never went to sleep. It was the Archchancellor's demands to start the day with a lap around the campus while chanting "I'm a lean, mean magic machine" that he couldn't live with.
The Lecturer in Recent Runes slapped the Bursar's hand away from the safety catch on one of the crossbows.
"It makes sense now why you had these brought in, Archchancellor," he said. "But one of the bolts appears to be tipped with wood and the other with silver."
"The Patrician's a bit eccentric, Runes. Best to have all the bases covered."
The wizards considered this for a moment. To them, the Patrician was normally the tall, thin man in black who ate only a fraction of the delicious morsels they piled on his plate at university dinners. This alone was enough evidence of at least latent vampirism. As for the silver-tipped arrow… They had seen him smile. Once or twice. The leader of a wolf pack in Uberwald in winter after a week on a starvation diet could have managed to look friendlier.
Ridcully took a dramatic breath. "Gentlemen, we have a problem. The Patrician has been sent to another dimension, my magic's all out, and we've got to bring him back fast. Any ideas?"
* Resourceful Ankh-Morpork pillow manufacturers had taken to sending unstuffed pillow cases to agents in the country who stood at the bottom of certain cliffs with a club in one hand and an empty case in the other. It was cheaper than feathers. It was also the origin of the A-M street term "I'm gonna lay onna lemming," its meaning similar to "I'm gonna hit the hay," which was far more common in Alexandra's dimension.
** See The Last Continent for an explanation of why it is necessary to lock up the Chair's croquet mallets when he gets a little frisky.
*** Young student wizards spend their time in the High Energy Magic Building where Hex, the Discworld's first artificial intelligence, delves the depths of the thaum, the smallest unit of magic. The senior wizards think Hex might one day be useful for sorting recipes.