The Wit & Wisdom of Discworld - By Terry Pratchett Page 0,25

became a wizard you were expected to stop shaving and grow a beard like a gorse bush. Very senior wizards looked capable of straining nourishment out of the air via their moustaches, like whales.

*

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

*

Most people think in curves and zigzags. For example, they start from a thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what’s for supper, and: I wonder who I know who can lend me five dollars?

Whereas Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell.

*

‘Mr Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before … And a man who could sell Mr Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything.’

*

There was a dog sitting by his feet.

It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically grey but with patches of brown, white and black in outlying areas …

It looked up slowly, and said ‘Woof?’

Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn’t that the dog had gone ‘woof!’, although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe never went ‘woof!’, they had complicated barks like ‘whuuugh!’ and ‘hwhoouf!’. No, it was that it hadn’t in fact barked at all. It had said ‘woof.

‘Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said “miaow”.’

He was aware of a strange smell. It was hard to place, but could perhaps have been a very old and slightly damp nursery rug.

‘Woof bloody woof,’ said Gaspode the Wonder Dog.

Dibbler gave Gaspode a long, slow stare, which was like challenging a centipede to an arse-kicking contest. Gaspode could outstare a mirror.

*

‘I never had a chance, you know. I mean, look at the start I had in life. Frone inna river inna sack. An actual sack. Dear little puppy dog opens his eyes, looks out in wonder at the world, style offing, he’s in this sack.’ The tears dripped off his nose. ‘For two weeks I thought the brick was my mother.’ …

‘Just my luck they threw me in the Ankh,’ Gaspode went on. ‘Any other river, I’d have drowned and gone to doggy heaven.’

*

Victor was aware of a cold sensation against his leg. It was as though a half-melted ice cube was soaking through his trousers. He tried to ignore it, but it had a definite unig-norable quality.

He looked down.

‘ ’scuse me,’ said Gaspode.

*

Mrs Marietta Cosmopilite of 3 Quirm Street, Ankh-Morpork, believed the world was round, that a sprig of garlic in her underwear drawer kept away vampires, that it did you good to get out and have a laugh occasionally, that there was niceness in everyone if you only knew where to look, and that three horrible little dwarfs peered in at her undressing every night.†

*

‘Well, of course,’ said Silverfish, ‘a lot of very talented people want to be in moving pictures. Can you sing?’

‘A bit. In the bath. But not very well,’ Victor conceded.

‘Can you dance?’

‘No.’

‘Swords? Do you know how to handle a sword?’

A little,’ said Victor.

‘I see,’ said Silverfish gloomily. ‘Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can handle a sword a little.’

You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air.

You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years.

‘I don’t understand her,’ he said. ‘Yesterday she was quite normal, today it’s all gone to her head.’

‘Bitches!’ said Gaspode, sympathetically.

‘Oh, I wouldn’t go that far,’ said Victor. ‘She’s just aloof

‘Loofs!’ said Gaspode.

*

The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These