He tried to remember the little he knew about them. They were magical creatures. They also had no mouths, since they subsisted entirely on the nourishing quality of the octarine wavelength in the Discworld’s sunlight, which they absorbed through their skins. Of course, they also absorbed the rest of the sunlight as well, storing it in a special sac until it was excreted in the normal way. A desert inhabited by Discworld salamanders was a veritable lighthouse at night.
Rincewind put them down and nodded grimly. With all the octarine light in this magical place the creatures had been gorging themselves, and then nature had taken its course.
The picture box sidled away on its tripod. Rincewind aimed a kick at it, and missed. He was beginning to dislike sapient pearwood.
Something small stung his cheek. He brushed it away irritably.
He looked around at a sudden grinding noise, and a voice like a carving knife cutting through silk said, “This is very undignified.”
“Shuddup,” said Hrun. He was using Kring to lever the top off the altar. He looked up at Rincewind and grinned. Rincewind hoped that rictus-strung grimace was a grin.
“Mighty magic,” commented the barbarian, pushing down heavily on the complaining blade with a hand the size of a ham. “Now we share the treasure, eh?”
Rincewind grunted as something small and hard struck his ear. There was a gust of wind, hardly felt.
“How do you know there’s treasure in there?” he said.
Hrun heaved, and managed to hook his fingers under the stone. “You find chokeapples under a chokeapple tree,” he said. “You find treasure under altars. Logic.”
He gritted his teeth. The stone swung up and landed heavily on the floor.
This time something struck Rincewind’s hand, heavily. He clawed at the air and looked at the thing he had caught. It was a piece of stone with five-plus-three sides. He looked up at the ceiling. Should it be sagging like that? Hrun hummed a little tune as he began to pull crumbling leather from the desecrated altar.
The air crackled, fluoresced, hummed. Intangible winds gripped the wizard’s robe, flapping it out in eddies of blue and green sparks. Around Rincewind’s head mad, half-formed spirits howled and gibbered as they were sucked past.
He tried raising a hand. It was immediately surrounded by a glowing octarine corona as the rising magical wind roared past. The gale raced through the room without stirring one iota of dust, yet it was blowing Rincewind’s eyelids inside out. It screamed along the tunnels, its banshee-wail bouncing madly from stone to stone.
Twoflower staggered up, bent double in the teeth of the astral gale.
“What the hell is this?” he shouted.
Rincewind half-turned. Immediately the howling wind caught him, nearly pitching him over. Poltergeist eddies, spinning in the rushing air, snatched at his feet.
Hrun’s arm shot out and caught him. A moment later he and Twoflower had been dragged into the lee of the ravaged altar, and lay panting on the floor. Beside them the talking sword Kring sparkled, its magical field boosted a hundredfold by the storm.
“Hold on!” screamed Rincewind.
“The wind!” shouted Twoflower. “Where’s it coming from? Where’s it blowing to?” He looked into Rincewind’s mask of sheer terror, which made him redouble his own grip on the stones.
“We’re doomed,” murmured Rincewind, while overhead the roof cracked and shifted. “Where do shadows come from? That’s where the wind is blowing!”
What was in fact happening, as the wizard knew, was that as the abused spirit of Bel-Shamharoth sank through the deeper chthonic planes his brooding spirit was being sucked out of the very stones into the region which, according to the Discworld’s most reliable priests, was both under the ground and Somewhere Else. In consequence his temple was being abandoned to the ravages of Time, who for thousands of shamefaced years had been reluctant to go near the place. Now the suddenly released, accumulated weight of all those pent-up seconds was bearing down heavily on the unbraced stones.
Hrun glanced up at the widening cracks and sighed. Then he put two fingers into his mouth and whistled.
Strangely the real sound rang out loudly over the pseudo-sound of the widening astral whirlpool that was forming in the middle of the great octagonal slab. It was followed by a hollow echo which sounded, he fancied, strangely like the bouncing of strange bones. Then came a noise with no hint of strangeness. It was hollow hoofbeats.
Hrun’s warhorse cantered through a creaking archway and reared up by its master, its mane streaming in the gale. The barbarian pulled himself to his feet and slung his treasure bags into a sack that hung from the saddle, then hauled himself onto the beast’s back. He reached down and grabbed Twoflower by the scruff of his neck, dragging him across the saddle tree. As the horse turned around Rincewind took a desperate leap and landed behind Hrun, who raised no objection.