“It’s me,” explained Twoflower helpfully. The wizard unrolled a fraction.
“What?” he said.
“Me.”
In one movement Rincewind unrolled and bounced up in front of the little man, his hands gripping his shoulders desperately. His eyes were wild and wide.
“Don’t say it!” he hissed. “Don’t say it and we might get out!”
“Get out? How did you get in? Don’t you know—”
“Don’t say it!”
Twoflower backed away from this madman.
“Don’t say it!”
“Don’t say what?”
“The number!”
“Number?” said Twoflower. “Hey, Rincewind—”
“Yes, number! Between seven and nine. Four plus four!”
“What, ei—”
Rincewind’s hands clapped over the man’s mouth. “Say it and we’re doomed. Just don’t think about it, right? Trust me!”
“I don’t understand!” wailed Twoflower. Rincewind relaxed slightly, which was to say that he still made a violin string look like a bowl of jelly.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s try and get out. And I’ll try and tell you.”
After the first Age of Magic the disposal of grimoires began to become a severe problem on the Discworld. A spell is still a spell even when imprisoned temporarily in parchment and ink. It has potency. This is not a problem while the book’s owner still lives, but on his death the spell book becomes a source of uncontrolled power that cannot easily be defused.
In short, spell books leak magic. Various solutions have been tried. Countries near the Rim simply loaded down the books of dead mages with leaden pentalphas and threw them over the Edge. Near the Hub less satisfactory alternatives were available. Inserting the offending books in canisters of negatively polarized octiron and sinking them in the fathomless depths of the sea was one (burial in deep caves on land was earlier ruled out after some districts complained of walking trees and five headed cats) but before long the magic seeped out and eventually fishermen complained of shoals of invisible fish or psychic clams.
A temporary solution was the construction, in various centers of magical lore, of large rooms made of denatured octiron, which is impervious to most forms of magic. Here the more critical grimoires could be stored until their potency had attenuated.
That was how there came to be at Unseen University the Octavo, greatest of all grimoires, formerly owned by the Creator of the Universe. It was this book that Rincewind had once opened for a bet. He had only a second to stare at a page before setting off various alarm spells, but that was time enough for one spell to leap from it and settle in his memory like a toad in a stone.
“Then what?” said Twoflower.
“Oh, they dragged me out. Thrashed me, of course.”
“And no one knows what the spell does?”
Rincewind shook his head.
“It’d vanished from the page,” he said. “No one will know until I say it. Or until I die, of course. Then it will sort of say itself. For all I know it stops the universe, or ends Time, or anything.”
Twoflower patted him on the shoulder.
“No sense in brooding,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s have another look for a way out.”
Rincewind shook his head. All the terror had been spent now. He had broken through the terror barrier, perhaps, and was in the dead calm state of mind that lies on the other side. Anyway, he had ceased to gibber.
“We’re doomed,” he stated. “We’ve been walking around all night. I tell you, this place is a spiderweb. It doesn’t matter which way we go, we’ll end up in the center.”
“It was kind of you to come looking for me, anyway,” said Twoflower. “How did you manage it exactly? It was very impressive.”
“Oh, well,” began the wizard awkwardly. “I just thought “I can’t leave old Twoflower there’ and—”
“So what we’ve got to do now is find this Bel-Shamharoth person and explain things to him and perhaps he’ll let us out,” said Twoflower.
Rincewind ran a finger around his ear.
“It must be the funny echoes in here,” he said. “I thought I heard you use words like find and explain.”
“That’s right.”
Rincewind glared at him in the hellish purple glow.
“Find Bel-Shamharoth?” he said.
“Yes. We don’t have to get involved.”
“Find the Soul Render and not get involved? Just give him a nod, I suppose, and ask the way to the exit? Explain things to the Sender of Eignnnngh,” Rincewind bit off the end of the word just in time and finished, “You’re insane! Hey! Come back!”
He darted down the passage after Twoflower, and after a few moments came to a halt with a groan.