It was a hot afternoon in the late summer in Ankh-Morpork, normally the most thriving, bustling and above all the most crowded city on the Disc. Now the spears of the sun had achieved what innumerable invaders, several civil wars and the curfew law had never achieved. It had pacified the place.
Dogs lay panting in the scalding shade. The river Ankh, which never what you might call sparkled, oozed between its banks as if the heat had sucked all the spirit out of it. The streets were empty, oven-brick hot.
No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well, technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders always found, after a few days, that they didn't own their own horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.
But the heat had besieged the city and triumphed over the walls. It lay over the trembling streets like a shroud. Under the blowlamp of the sun assassins were too tired to kill. It turned thieves honest. In the ivy-covered fastness of the Unseen University, premier college of wizardry, the inmates dozed with their pointy hats over their faces. Even bluebottles were too exhausted to bang against windowpanes. The city siesta'd, awaiting the sunset and the brief, hot, velvet surcease of the night.
Only the librarian was cool. He was also swinging and hanging out.
This was because he'd rigged up a few ropes and rings in one of the sub-basements of the Unseen University library - the one where they kept the, um, erotic[1] books. In vats of crushed ice. And he was dreamily dangling in the chilly vapour above them.
All books of magic have a life of their own. Some of the really energetic ones can't simply be chained the bookshelves; they have to be nailed shut or kept between steel plates. Or, in the case of the volumes on tantric sex magic for the serious connoisseur, kept under very cold water to stop them bursting into flames and scorching their severely plain covers.
The Librarian swung gently back and forth above the seething vats, dozing peacefully.
Then the footsteps came out of nowhere, raced across the floor with a noise that scraped the raw surface of the soul, and disappeared through the wall. There was a faint, distant scream that sounded like ogodsogodsogods, this is IT, I'm gonna DIE.
The Librarian woke up, lost his grip, and flopped into the few inches of tepid water that was all that stood between The Joy of Tantric Sex with Illustrations for the Advanced Student, by A Lady, and spontaneous combustion.
And it would have gone badly for him if the Librarian had been a human being. Fortunately, he was currently an orang-utan. With so much raw magic sloshing around in the Library it would be surprising if accidents did not happen sometimes, and one particularly impressive one had turned him into an ape. Not many people get the chance to leave the human race while still alive, and he'd strenuously resisted all efforts to turn him back. Since he was the only librarian in the universe who could pick up books with his feet the University hadn't pressed the point.
It also meant that his idea of desirable female companionship now looked something like a sack of butter thrown through a roll of old inner tubes, and so he was lucky to get away with only minor burns, a headache, and some rather ambivalent feelings about cucumbers, which wore off by teatime.
In the Library above, the grimoires creaked and rustled their pages in astonishment as the invisible runner passed straight through the bookshelves and disappeared, or rather disappeared even more...
Ankh-Morpork gradually awoke from its slumber. Something invisible and yelling at the top of its voice was passing through every part of the city, dragging in its wake a trail of destruction. Wherever it went, things changed.
A fortune-teller in the Street of Cunning Artificers heard the footsteps run across her bedr…
