Терри Пратчетт - The Colour of Magic

An explanation occurred to the wizard. “Ah,” he said. “You’ve come to hire mercenaries (“warriors who fight for the tribe with most milknut-meal”)?”

“Oh no. I just want to meet them. So that when I get home I can say that I did it.”

Rincewind thought that a meeting with most of the Drum’s clientele would mean that Twoflower never went home again, unless he lived downriver and happened to float past.

“Where is your home?” he inquired.

Broadman had slipped away into some back room, he noticed. Hugh was watching them suspiciously from a nearby table.

“Have you heard of the city of Des Palargic?”

“Well, I didn’t spend much time in Trob. I was just passing through, you know—”

“Oh, it’s not in Trob. I speak Trob because there are many beTrobi sailors in our ports. Des Palargic is the major seaport of the Agatean Empire.”

“Never heard of it, I’m afraid.”

Twoflower raised his eyebrows. “No? It is quite big. You sail turnwise from the Brown Islands for about a week and there it is. Are you all right?” He hurried around the table and patted the wizard on the back. Rincewind choked on his beer-The Counterweight Continent!

Three streets away an old man dropped a coin into a saucer of acid and swirled it gently. Broadman waited impatiently, ill at ease in a room made noisome by vats and bubbling beakers and lined with shelves containing shadowy shapes suggestive of skulls and stuffed impossibilities.

“Well?” he demanded.

“One cannot hurry these things,” said the old alchemist peevishly. “Assaying takes time. Ah.” He prodded the saucer, where the coin now lay in a swirl of green colour. He made some calculations on a scrap of parchment.

“Exceptionally interesting,” he said at last.

“Is it genuine?”

The old man pursed his lips. “it depends on how you define the term,” he said. “if you mean: is this coin the same as, say, a fifty-dollar piece, then the answer is no.”

“I knew” it,” screamed the innkeeper, and started towards the door.

“I’m not sure that I’m making myself clear,” said the alchemist. Broadman turned round angrily.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you see, what with one thing and another our coinage has been somewhat watered, over the years. The gold content of the average coin is barely four parts in twelve, the balance being made up of silver, copper—”

“What of it?”

“I said this coin isn’t like ours. It is pure gold.”

After Broadman had left, at a run, the alchemist spent some time staring at the ceiling. Then he drew out a very small piece of thin parchment, rummaged for a pen amongst the debris on his workbench, and wrote a very short, small, message. Then he went over to his cages of white doves, black cockerels and other laboratory animals. From one cage he removed a glossy coated rat, rolled the parchment into the phial attached to a hind leg, and let the animal go.

It sniffed around the floor for a moment, then disappeared down a hole in the far wall. At about this time a hitherto unsuccessful fortune-teller living on the other side of the block chanced to glance into her scrying bowl, gave a small scream and, within the hour, had sold her jewellery, various magical accoutrements, most of her clothes and almost all her other possessions that could not be conveniently carried on the fastest horse she could buy. The fact that later on, when her house collapsed in flames, she herself died in a freak landslide in the Morpork Mountains, proves that Death, too, has a sense of humour.

Also at about the same moment as the homing rat disappeared into the maze of runs under the city, scurrying along in faultless obedience to an ancient instinct, the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork picked up the letters delivered that morning by albatross. He looked pensively at the topmost one again, and summoned his chief of spies.

And in the Broken Drum Rincewind was listening open-mouthed as Twoflower talked.

“So I decided to see for myself,” the little man was saying. “Eight years’ saving up, this has cost me. But worth every half-rhinu. I mean, here I am. In Ankh-Morpork. Famed in song and story, I mean. In the streets that have known the tread of Hemic Whiteblade. Hrun the Barbarian, and Bravd the Hublander and the Weasel… It’s all just like I imagined, you know.”

Rincewind’s face was a mask of fascinated horror.

“I just couldn’t stand it any more back in Des Pelargic,” Twoflower went on blithely, “sitting at a desk all day, just adding up columns of figures, just a pension to look forward to at the end of it… where’s the romance in that? Twoflower, I thought, it’s now or never. You don’t just have to listen to stories. You can go there. Now’s the time to stop hanging around the docks listening to sailors’ tales. So I compiled a phrase book and bought a passage on the next ship to the Brown Islands.”

“No guards?” murmured Rincewind.

“No. Why? What have I got that’s worth stealing?”

Rincewind coughed. “You have, uh, gold,” he said.

“Barely two thousand rhinu. Hardly enough to keep a man alive for more than a month or two. At home, that is. I imagine they might stretch a bit further here.”

“Would a rhinu be one of those big gold coins?” said Rincewind.

“Yes.” Twoflower looked worriedly at the wizard over the top of his strange seeing-lenses. “Will two thousand be sufficient, do you think?”

“Yarrrt,” croaked Rincewind. “I mean, yes sufficient. “

“Good.”

“Um. Is everyone in the Agatean Empire as rich as you?”

“Me? Rich? Bless you, whatever put that idea into your head? “I am but a poor clerk! Did I pay the innkeeper too much, do you think?” Twoflower added.

“Uh. He might have settled for less,” Rincewind conceded.

“Ah. I shall know better next time. I can see I have a lot to learn. An idea occurs to me. Rincewind would you perhaps consent to be employed as a, I don’t know, perhaps the word “guide” would fit the circumstances? I think I could afford to pay you a rhinu a day.”

Rincewind opened his mouth to reply but felt the words huddle together in his throat, reluctant to emerge in a world that was rapidly going mad. Twoflower blushed.

“I have offended you,” he said. it was an impertinent request to make of a professional man such as yourself. Doubtless you have many projects you wish to return to– some works of high magic, no doubt…”

“No,” said Rincewind faintly. “Not just at present. A rhinu, you say? One a day. Every day?”

“I think perhaps in the circumstances I should make it one and one-half rhinu per day. Plus any out-of-pocket expenses, of course.”

The wizard rallied magnificently. “That will be fine,” he Said. “Great.”

Twoflower reached into his pouch and took out a large round gold object, glanced at it for a moment, and slipped it back. Rincewind didn’t get a chance to see it properly.

“I think,” said the tourist, “that I would like a little sleep now. It was a long crossing. And then perhaps you would care to call back at noon and we can take a look at the city.”

“Sure.”

“Then please be good enough to ask the innkeeper to Show me to my room.”

Rincewind did so, and watched the nervous Broadman, who had arrived at a gallop from some back room, lead the way up the wooden steps behind the bar. After a few seconds the luggage got up and pattered across the floor after them. Then the wizard looked down at the six big coins in his hand. Twoflower had insisted on paying his first four days’ wages in advance. Hugh nodded and smiled encouragingly.

Rincewind snarled at him.

As a student wizard Rincewind had never achieved high marks in precognition, but now unused circuits in his brain were throbbing and the future might as well have been engraved in bright colours on his eyeballs. The space between his shoulder blades began to itch. The sensible thing to do, he knew, was to buy a horse. It would have to be a fast one, and expensive—offhand, Rincewind couldn’t think of any horse-dealer he knew who was rich enough to give change out of almost a whole ounce of gold.