The Turtle Moves! Read Online Free Page B

about heroes and adventure in Ankh-Morpork and the surrounding lands, and has come to see the place for himself. He’s brought a not-very-good phrasebook, a large quantity of gold, the Discworld equivalent of a camera, 52 and a magical trunk known hereafter as the Luggage. 53
    Twoflower has heard the stories, but he obviously hasn’t really understood them. He’s quite sure that he won’t be harmed, no matter how dangerous the place may be, because after all, he’s just a tourist, not an adventurer.
    That adventurers can be people who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that the famous ones are the minority who didn’t die, has never occurred to him. He looks on Ankh-Morpork as a big theater putting on a show for his entertainment, and doesn’t for a minute see himself as a participant; he’s just an observer. He wants to see the tavern brawls, the barbarian heroes, the Whore Pits, 54 and so on, and is completely oblivious to any possible danger in this.
    And he does get to see tavern brawls, barbarian heroes, and Whore Pits. Amazingly, thanks to Rincewind, he also survives intact, though he’s responsible (quite unintentionally) for setting a large part of Ankh-Morpork ablaze. 55 The two of them escape the city (and Bravd and the Weasel) and venture elsewhere.

    The second section (or chapter, or novella) of The Colour of Magic , “The Sending of Eight,” gives us haunted forests and mysterious ancient crypts and destinies guided by the whims of gods—dark fantasy, in the mode of Weird Tales , 56 with some distinctly Lovecraftian 57 touches, but adapted to the Discworld.
    We now learn that, like many fantasy characters, these characters are caught up in a game played by the gods, notably Fate and the Lady, the latter clearly being Lady Luck, though her name is never mentioned, since it’s bad luck to address her by name.
    The Lady, being who she is, cheats.
    While the idea of names or words one mustn’t say aloud for fear of attracting the attention of hostile supernatural powers is an old and familiar one—for example, in Lovecraft’s stories, speaking the name of Hastur the Unspeakable aloud is “a punishable blasphemy”—Mr. Pratchett carries this a step farther into absurdity in this story with the unspeakable number , the one between seven and nine. This is the Number of Bel-Shamharoth, also known as the Sender of Eight and the Soul Eater, an abominable god much like the Great Old Ones that H.P. Lovecraft originated. (Many other authors have imitated Lovecraft’s creations since then.)
    Rincewind attempts to rescue Twoflower from the Temple of Bel-Shamharoth; Twoflower, the determined innocent tourist, does not make this easy.
    We also see a good bit of Hrun the Barbarian, who makes his living robbing ancient temples, battling monsters, and so on, and who is clearly based on Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. We’re definitely
in Weird Tales territory here, even though I don’t see much that’s specifically taken from Clark Ashton Smith—but on the other hand, there’s also the frequent mention of the sound of rolling dice. While that’s a reference to the game being played by the gods, it’s also a reference to the unfortunate spate of second-rate fantasy novels in the late seventies and early eighties that were a little too obviously based on Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games, games where dice rolls determine the outcome of every fight. Readers of the time would often say disparagingly of such obviously game-based novels, “You can hear the dice rolling.”
    Well, in “The Sending of Eight,” the characters can literally hear the dice rolling, as the gods play with them.
    There are other interesting tidbits here, as well. Rincewind, despite being a wizard, doesn’t much like magic, and often wishes the world operated on more sensible principles,