Chapter 8: Croggly's Redux
Several hundred people watched with expectation as Vetinari opened the first envelope. It was far from silent in the barn. Somebody always coughed. Or cleared his throat. Or whispered to his neighbor. Enough low-level noise pervaded the barn that Vetinari had to speak louder than he liked.
He held up a card and announced: "Tenth through sixth prizes: Family gift certificates to Hetty Bullweavel's Diner." He paused, eyebrows raised. "'Best grits this side of the Valley.'"
The audience clapped with approval. Hetty's grits were the best in the kingdom, if you asked them. If you asked Vetinari, the best kind of grits were the kind you didn't have to eat. He set the card aside and reached into the bowl. The crowd held its breath.
"Tenth prize: Propriety Smith."
A sob erupted from the crowd, and the people parted as a woman with blue ribbons in her hair trotted up to the dance floor and threw her arms around Vetinari.
"I never won nothin' in my life," she cried. She planted a wet kiss on Vetinari's cheek, accepted the gift certificate and shook Mr. Smiggins' hand. The crowd applauded at Propriety's appropriate show of gratefulness. These were Hetty's grits, after all.
Propriety drank her complimentary shot of scumble and returned to the crowd, happily clutching her prize.
Her kiss had been especially sloppy, and Vetinari had to repress the urge to wipe his face. Instead, he reached into the bowl again and hoped the name on the paper would not be that of a female.
With a sigh, he announced: "Sally Lambertson."
* * *
Ponder and Drumknott returned to the Patrician's parlour just as the wizards finished clearing the center of the room of furniture. The Bursar had refused to leave the couch and had giggled when the wizards hauled it -- with a good deal of bickering and complaints about old age and bad backs -- out of the way. Now only Ridcully's chess figure stood in the middle of the carpet.
Drumknott carried something large covered with a cloth. "Where should I put this?" he said.
"Senior Wrangler, could you give us a hand?" said Ponder.
Drumknott eased the item into the Senior Wrangler's arms. The wizard held it for a moment, then set it on the floor.
"It's a bit heavy, whatever it is," he said.
"When I give you the signal, just hold it up, all right, sir?" Ponder said.
"Clear as pie, Stibbons."
Ridcully reached over to pull off the cloth but Ponder stepped in front of him.
"Please, Archchancellor! Everything will be clear when the Patrician returns."
"You're not even going to tell your Archchancellor what it is?"
"There's not really time to explain, sir," said Ponder.
Ridcully irritably tapped his staff on the floor. "Do I sense a whiff of drama, Mr. Stibbons?" Ridcully normally approved of drama, within limits, as long as he was the star.
"Sorry, Archchancellor," said Ponder, "but I really don't think we have much time."
"Right. We'll just have to trust your judgement, and blame you if something goes wrong," Ridcully said. "Now, then, let's get started." He pointed at Drumknott. "You might want to wait outside unless you want to spend the next few days in another dimension yourself."
"No, sir." Drumknott had briefly considered staying for the spell, but Ridcully had a convincing counter argument. He backed out of the room and shut the door.
The wizards gathered in a wide circle, staffs in hand. They each had that sensation of watery-knee'd vertigo you get when you look down at the pool before jumping off the high dive. No one had ever reversed Croggly's Sub-dimensional Discombobulator. They didn't quite know what would happen when they tried. The consequences, they hoped, would not involve the Dungeon Dimensions.*
"Take it away, Dean," Ridcully said.
The Dean cleared his throat. This, of course, was his moment. If Ridcully could do Croggly's spell all by himself, the Dean could manage it with the backing of the senior faculty. In fact, he reasoned, he could manage it better. There was a twinkle in his eye.
He started to chant.
* * *
All of the winners of Hetty Bullweavel's gift certificates had been women. Vetinari reflected that he had never been kissed by so many women in one night. The age range had also been a novelty. Sarah Diggers had been a teenager with pale hair and a paler face, while Mrs. Marianne Loon, who happened to be the woman who first met him when he entered the barn, had been in her 70s and a surprisingly functional drunk.
The Lottery moved on to the fourth and fifth prizes, a month's supply of scumble. The crowd applauded at the announcement despite the fact that many of its members had succeeded in drinking a month's supply in the past few hours alone.
Vetinari drew a slip from the glass bowl.
"Septimus Peterson," he said.
A young man with long hair fluttered up to the dance floor. Vetinari hoped a hand shake would be sufficient.
***
The chess piece rose up from the carpet, its black sheen now hidden by an octarine glow. The wizards bent their minds to it. The knight was all they had to help them find the Patrician.
Ridcully had merely sent Lord Vetinari into a random dimension. It was a bigger trick to find out which one, target the Patrician and bring him back to the Palace in one piece.
The Archchancellor had used up his magic for the day so he stood on the sidelines and acted like a cross between a football coach and a cheerleader.
"Step on it, gentlemen!" he said. "Work the spell!"
The rest of the wizards concentrated. The chess piece began to turn, then spun faster and faster until all they could see was a ball of octarine that engulfed the piece and slowly grew larger.
"That's the way!" Ridcully said over the thaumic echoes that began booming in the parlour. "You're getting through!"
The air thickened and tasted like tin.
The Librarian's red fur stood on end but he still clutched the crossbows. Ridcully's orders.
* * *
Vetinari moved on to third prize, a pair of goats named Arthur and Alice, kindly donated by the Lob family.
He drew the slip, glanced at the name, and prepared himself for another attack of joy from an ecstatic Lottery winner:
"Patricia Rain," he announced.
As the cries of a woman drifted in from the back of the barn, Vetinari caught sight of Alexandra. She stood on the edge of the crowd, laughing at him silently.
Patricia Rain burst onto the dance floor. She took the prize card from Vetinari just as he felt… as if a shower of molten metal had been poured over his head and was seeping through his body. All at once, the barn was far too hot. He grasped the edge of the table and tried to stay on his feet.
* * *
"More power!" shouted Ridcully.
The thaumic waves swirled around the parlour, whipping the curtains into a wild dance. The more prim wizards – meaning all of them – modestly held down their robes in case anyone got a look at their undies.
A gray fog materialized out of the octarine ball. It grew bigger until the wizards could just make out the contours of a landscape.
"We've got it!" the Dean cried over the thaumic noise.
The window into the other dimension stopped growing, but the fog began to clear. They saw snowy fields, an icy road and the massive barn with its red and green lanterns. The wizards followed the birds eye view of the spell into the barn, where a mass of people applauded. In the center was a tall, thin figure in dark green.
"Who's that?" shouted the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
"That's him, isn't it, Mister Stibbons?" said Ridcully.
"Must be, Archchancellor, or the spell wouldn't focus on him."
"What's he dressed like that for?" said the Dean. "I thought he was supposed to be a knight."
"Maybe the armour was too heavy," said the Chair of Indefinite Studies over the noise. "I heard that a full suit of armour can weigh as much as—"
A low buzzing cut off his words. The wizards looked around warily. The buzzing was usually associated with unpleasant Creatures from dimensions the wizards did not want to visit or receive visitors from. The Creatures always honed in on high discharges of magic.
"All right, gentleman," said Ridcully. "Time's up. Let's bring him back."
***
Vetinari had the feeling that he moved through warm marmalade as he announced the winner of second prize, a new plow. His breathing was short and through his eyes, the barn looked to be under a heat haze that rippled like a fata morgana. He wiped his face with a handkerchief. Alexandra appeared beside him, a cup of water in her hands.
"Are you all right?" she asked.
***
The wizards gave one last burst of concentration on the figure in the dimensional window. Vetinari came through at first only as a transparent form with fuzzy, octarine edges. The form quickly changed into a reflection mirrored in a thousand different images that stretched into a thousand different dimensions. The images wavered, dissolved, and a single, transparent Vetinari finally floated in the center of the circle. He moved as if reaching out for something.
His transparency turned to static, then to a flickering that made it seem like Vetinari wore the armour of a knight and the robes of the Patrician one after the other, and then at the same time. In those moments of uncertainty, the wizards feared the link between the two dimensions could collapse with Vetinari still in between.
Finally, the armour disappeared and the image of the Patrician solidified inside an octarine cocoon. The shell rapidly faded and then dissolved altogether. In a moment Vetinari was there, standing in front of a shrinking dimensional window.
"We got him!" cried Ridcully. "We—" His cry of triumph died.
As the dimensional window wavered, a long, black tentacle slipped out, caught Vetinari's leg and pulled him off his feet. A misshapen head with several fly-like eyes peered out from the window. Its buzzing overwhelmed the roar of the spell's thaumic noise.
The wizards prepared for the massive task of shifting from Croggly's spell to dealing with the Creature.
"Fireballs, gentlemen!" said the Dean over the buzzing. "Ready? Aim! Toast 'm!"
The Dean, the Lecturer in Recent Runes and the Chair of Indefinite Studies let balls of octarine fire shoot from their staffs. When they burst into the Creature, it screamed, a sound on the edge of hearing as unbearable as a high-pitched siren. It released Vetinari and slithered back to whatever dimension it came from.
Lord Vetinari struggled to his feet and stared around in shock. In the haze of the dimensional window, recently vacated by the Creature, he could just make out the small red and green figures in the barn. Only Ponder Stibbons guessed what he was about to do.
"Grab him!" he shouted.
The wizards leapt as Lord Vetinari jumped toward the window. He landed heavily under a thousand pounds of wizard, his face in the carpet as the window shrank to the size of a dinner plate and winked out.
* The Dungeon Dimensions are full of dreadful things. Best not to talk about it.