“?” said the stranger. Broadman held up three thick red fingers and the man’s face was suddenly a sunny display of comprehension. He reached into his pouch and laid three large gold pieces in Broadman’s palm.
Broadman stared at them. They represented about four times the worth of the Broken Drum, staff included. He looked at Hugh. There was no help there. He looked at the stranger. He swallowed.
“Yes,” he said, in an unnaturally high voice. “And then there’s meals, o’course. Uh. You understand, yes? Food. You eat. No?” He made the appropriate motions.
“Fut?” said the little man.
“Yes,” said Broadman, beginning to sweat. “Have a look in your little book, I should.”
The man opened the book and ran a finger down one page. Broadman, who could read after a fashion, peered over the top of the volume. What he saw made no sense.
“Fooood,” said the stranger. “Yes. Cutlet, hash, chop, stew, ragout, fricassee, mince, collops, soufflé, dumpling, blancmange, sorbet, gruel, sausage, not to have a sausage, beans, without a bean, kickshaws, jelly, jam. Giblets.” He beamed at Broadman.
“All that?” said the innkeeper weakly.
“It’s just the way he talks,” said Hugh. “Don’t ask me why. He just does.”
All eyes in the room were watching the stranger—except for a pair belonging to Rincewind the wizard, who was sitting in the darkest corner nursing a mug of very small beer.
He was watching the Luggage.
Watch Rincewind.
Look at him. Scrawny, like most wizards, and clad in a dark red robe on which a few mystic sigils were embroidered in tarnished sequins. Some might have taken him for a mere apprentice enchanter who had run away from his master out of defiance, boredom, fear and a lingering taste for heterosexuality. Yet around his neck was a chain bearing the bronze octagon that marked him as an alumnus of Unseen University, the high school of magic whose time-and-space transcendent campus is never precisely Here or There. Graduates were usually destined for mageship at least, but Rincewind—after an unfortunate event—had left knowing only one spell and made a living of sorts around the town by capitalizing on an innate gift for languages. He avoided work as a rule, but had a quickness of wit that put his acquaintances in mind of a bright rodent. And he knew sapient pearwood when he saw it. He was seeing it now, and didn’t quite believe it.
An archmage, by dint of great effort and much expenditure of time, might eventually obtain a small staff made from the timber of the sapient pear tree. It grew only on the sites of ancient magic. There were probably no more than two such staffs in all the cities of the Circle Sea. A large chest of it…Rincewind tried to work it out, and decided that even if the box were crammed with star opals and sticks of auricholatum the contents would not be worth one-tenth the price of the container. A vein started to throb in his forehead.
He stood up and made his way to the trio.
“May I be of assistance?” he ventured.
“Shove off, Rincewind,” snarled Broadman.
“I only thought it might be useful to address this gentleman in his own tongue,” said the wizard gently.
“He’s doing all right on his own,” said the innkeeper, but took a few steps backward.
Rincewind smiled politely at the stranger and tried a few words of Chimeran. He prided himself on his fluency in the tongue, but the stranger only looked bemused.
“It won’t work,” said Hugh knowledgeably. “It’s the book, you see. It tells him what to say. Magic.”
Rincewind switched to High Borogravian, to Vanglemesht, Sumtri and even Black Oroogu, the language with no nouns and only one adjective, which is obscene. Each was met with polite incomprehension. In desperation he tried heathen Trob, and the little man’s face split into a delighted grin.
“At last!” he said. “My good sir! This is remarkable!” (Although in Trob the last word in fact became “a thing which may happen but once in the usable lifetime of a canoe hollowed diligently by ax and fire from the tallest diamondwood tree that grows in the noted diamondwood forests on the lower slopes of Mount Awayawa, home of the firegods or so it is said.”)
“What was all that?” said Broadman suspiciously.
“What did the innkeeper say?” said the little man.
Rincewind swallowed. “Broadman,” he said. “Two mugs of your best ale, please.”
“You can understand him?”
“Oh, sure.”
“Tell him—tell him he’s very welcome. Tell him breakfast is—uh—one gold piece.” For a moment Broadman’s face looked as though some vast internal struggle was going on, and then he added with a burst of generosity, “I’ll throw in yours, too.”
“Stranger,” said Rincewind levelly. “If you stay here you will be knifed or poisoned by nightfall. But don’t stop smiling, or so will I.”