Rincewind, DM (Hon.), Egregious Professor of Cruel and Unusual Geography, Reader in Cryptic Languages, Health and Safety Officer and seventeen other positions no one else wanted finished writing his translation of the last of the Palindromic Scrolls of Loko, dried the ink and rolled it up. He wrapped a light iron chain around it and put it in the basket with the others of its sort and stepped back.
"They're all yours now," he said to the Librarian. "Are you going to put them in the basement?"
"Ook!" The Librarian picked up the basket, stuck it under one arm and knuckled his way with great determination to the stairs leading to the Library's basement.
The basement of Unseen University's Library is a fearsome place. As with any library, the UU Library is dangerous. After all, books are dangerous in and of themselves. They can set an suggestable mind on fire and make it burn down the neighborhood--and those are just ordinary books. Books of magic grow into magical books which have a life of their own. Books contain knowledge and knowledge equals power. Power, in turn, equals energy which equals mass, [(Force x Distance) ÷ Time], after all. Thus the Library has the space time of a moderate black hole and warps the space within it to the extent that while the building only has a circumference of a couple of hundred feet, its radius approaches infinity. It contains every book ever written, every book ever proposed and even those books which were thought of but never put on paper. But the Basement is the worst. Here are books of such malice and power that they command entire shelves to themselves and sometimes entire rooms lest they catch readers in a moment of inattention and are found the next morning in a new, revised, expanded and smug edition with a pair of smoking pointy toed shoes in front of them. Yes, they read people.
Here can be found the imperious Octavo, the Monster Fun Grimoire full of vicious practical jokes, the Joy of Tantric Sex (which has to be kept submerged in ice water and is forbidden reading to any wizard younger than eighty) and other volumes so hazardous that only senior wizards can go among them and return--and not always even them. These rooms the Librarian only enters wearing heavy leather gloves and a helmet with a dark glass visor. And even so he is given to occasionally muttering a quiet, anthropoid prayer before unlocking the door.
The original Scrolls of Loko were a treatise on splitting the thaum, that smallest of magical particles. When the University faculty tried it, they unlocked so much power that they had to divert it to an alternate Universe where it formed worlds that were spherical and lacked any interactive gods, the element narrativium and even the slightest hint of magic. The original writer was not so fortunate and the result was an immense crater surrounded by mountains and filled with an alarmingly strong magical field. The forests therein are inhabited by strange magical creatures like centaurs and fauns but exploring there causes fatal magical diseases like 'planets'. This, in fact, is what killed the late Stanmer Crustley, DM, and all the members of the expedition he led to Loko but at least they did bring the Scrolls back to Unseen before expiring in agony. Orcs seem to be immune to these maladies but no one else goes there--for obvious reasons.
Today the original Scrolls are kept in the Library carefully guarded by powerful spells and wards. These were cast originally by the Faculty Council but today are kept in place by the Department of Lokotian Studies. It was one of their students, one Darcy Birdwhistle, who invented a solid lens of scrying and inadvertently laid it on an open scroll. What it revealed was an entirely different set of Scrolls concealed beneath the visible writing of the originals'. Under the watchful eyes of the Archchancellor, his Vice, the Librarian and Professor Pelc, Birdwhistle painstakingly copied out the hidden palimpsest though it turned out to be in a language neither he nor his supervisors recognized. Fortunately Professor Rincewind has a strange talent for languages and he translated it all. This earned him a new title but gave him something else to worry about--as if he needed another.
"So, Professor," Birdwhistle asked Rincewind, "what did all that writing say?"
Rincewind wiped the perspiration from his forehead, shuddered and replied, "Most of it deals with the possibility of becoming a Sourcerer. The rest is instructions of what to do, once you have accomplished that, in order to become the Evil Emperor."
"What? You can become a Sourcerer? That's mad. Don't you have to be the eighth son of an eighth son of an eighth son?"
"That's th' usual supposition," Archchancellor Ridcully replied, coming up from behind the pair, "but it may not be 'n iron-clad rule. And while an eighth son to th' third power is automatically a Sourcerer, that may not be th' only route. There was always th' question o' Simon. Hex has declared that th' man was a Sourcerer but we had no reason to believe that his father, and grandfather were wizards. We don't even know if he knew. He never spoke o' any of his ancestors besides his mother but there was no doubtin' th' power of th' man. Fortunately, he drove all his efforts into thaumaturgical theory rather than warpin' reality. Still, there is that precedent."
Birdwhistle paled. "And now we have instructions for someone to make himself one. That's beyond ghastly. We should just burn that scroll and wipe my lens of scrying from the world!"
Rincewind shook his head. "You can't undo history--at least we can't. However, the Library Basement is just the place to put them. Hardly anyone dares go there and except for the Librarian and the most senior wizards, anyone who did would be very unlikely to come back up. We lose about one student in five to the books up here in the stacks. Any wizard lower than seventh level would probably get eaten just walking down the basement halls, let alone if they tried to go into some of those rooms. You'll never catch me going down there!"
Birdwhistle swallowed. "Nor me! I'm sure I can have a long and happy magical career without whatever knowledge is locked in the basement. Here, Archchancellor, will you please take this lens and put it somewhere safe? I am becoming very sorry I ever made the thing."
Ridcully patted the young man on the shoulder. "Such prudence becomes y', young Birdwhistle. I foresee a sober and steady path ahead o' y'. You earned your DM with th' lens and th' translation. You'll get a faculty position for showin' so much good sense, besides. We can always use more o' that."
*****
Jocasta Wiggs, B.Sci, perused the contracts on file in the Assassins' Inhumation Office. Since her family was a wealthy one and had been made more wealthy by their skill over generations at the Black Syllabus, she was in no particular need of money. Mostly she was just keeping up with the city's social order. In other words, she was keeping tabs on who wanted whom dead! In the past, assassination had been a rather final game that one aristocratic family played against others, but as Ankh-Morpork's mercantile classes rose though the social ranks, their increased wealth admitted them into the Guild's clientele. There was an unspoken understanding between the King's Scholars and the Scholarship Students that each group tended to service only the members of their own class. This was, though, more a guideline than an enforceable rule.
As she filtered through the sheafs of proposals, she came across one offering AM$100,000 for the inhumation of one A. E. Pessimal. She stopped. Inhume the Chief Inspector of the Watch? Now there was a contract that was going nowhere! Not only was the Chief Inspector a renowned fighter in his own right (he'd once attacked a drugged up troll with his teeth!) but Commander Vimes had made it clear that he would get positively intense if anyone tried harming one of his Watchmen. Jocasta looked at the name on the contract. Grabbly Lavish. Hmpf! A Lavish. It figured. Inspector Pessimal had no doubt uncovered the plaintiff's failure to pay city taxes and had not only raided the man's bank account for the sum owed but had tacked on substantial penalties and interest. Since Pessimal had attained his current position in the Watch, civic revenues had increased substantially. The man may be physically small but his impact is immense. Tax evasion has become very unprofitable lately. Sadly for them, the Lavishes haven't caught on to the new order of things.
She turned to the next one and chuckled. It was an official assessment on the previous Lavish for AM$35,000 and had been endorsed by another of the family. This had become rather regular over the last couple of years. Previously the Lavish family had vented their spleens endlessly toward each other in the law courts with the result that the Guild of Lawyers had seen their personal fortunes greatly enhanced. Mr. Slant of Morcombe, Slant and Honeyplace, Attys at Law, had over his very long practice (he is a zombie, after all) accumulated so much in fees that his fortune very nearly approached that of an individual Lavish.
But recently some members of the family had come to the realization that suing each other was not only expensive but not particularly fruitful. Referring disputes to the Assassins, on the other hand, while even more expensive was terminally effective. Young graduates of the Black Syllabus found this quite profitable, mostly because while the Lavish's, like the majority of the city's wealthy, attended the Assassins' Guild School they never studied defensive tactics. Even senior Assassins took out the occasional contract just to make sure they hadn't lost their touch. At least two Lavish's had been found in circumstances indicating they'd been poisoned while exhibiting no signs of poison. This suggested that Lord Downey may have been involved.
