The Last Continent by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub

The worst thing about losing your temper with Mustrum Ridcully was that he never noticed when you did.

Wizards, when faced with danger, would immediately stop and argue amongst themselves about exactly what kind of danger it was. By the time everyone in the party understood, either it had become the sort of danger where your options are so very, very clear that you instantly take one of them or die, or it had got bored and gone away. Even danger has its pride.

When he was a boy, Ponder Stibbons had imagined that wizards would be powerful demi-gods able to change the whole world at the flick of a finger, and then he’d grown up and found that they were tiresome old men who worried about the state of their feet and, in harm’s way, would even bicker about the origin of the phrase “in harm’s way.”

It had never struck him that evolution works in all kinds of ways. There were still quite deep scars in old buildings that showed what happened when you had the other kind of wizard.

His footsteps took him, almost without his being aware, along the gently winding path up the mountain. Strange creatures peered at him from the undergrowth on either side. Some of them looked like—

Wizards think in terms of books, and, now, one crept out from the shelves of Ponder’s memory. It had been given to him when he was small. In fact, he’d still got it somewhere, filed away in a cardboard box.*

It had consisted of lots of small pages on a central spiral. Each one showed the head, body or tail of some bird, fish or animal. It was possible for the sufficiently bored to shuffle and turn them so that you got, say, a creature with the head of a horse, the body of a beetle and the tail of a fish. The cover promised “hours of fun” although, after the first three minutes, you couldn’t help wondering what kind of person could make that kind of fun last for hours, and whether suffocating him as kindly as possible now would save the Serial Crimes Squad a lot of trouble in years to come. Ponder, however, had hours of fun.

Some of the creat—things in the undergrowth looked like the pages of that book. There were birds with beaks as long as their bodies. There were spiders the size of hands. Here and there the air shimmered like water. It resisted very gently as Ponder tried to walk through it, and then let him pass, but the birds and insects didn’t seem inclined to follow him.

There were beetles everywhere.

Eventually, by easy stages, the winding path reached the top of the mountain. There was a tiny valley there, just below the peak. At the far end was a large cave mouth, lit by a blue glow within.

A large beetle sang past Ponder’s ear.

The cave mouth opened into a cavern, filled with misty blue fog. There was a suggestion of complex shadows. And there

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