Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.
Or what for that matter.
That's for me not to know and you to find out.
If someone told Susan that Death had a house, she would have called them mad or, even worse, stupid. But if she'd had to imagine one, she'd have drawn, in sensible black crayon, some towering, battlement, Gothic mansion. It would loom, and involve other words ending in 'oom', like gloom and doom. There would have been thousands of windows. She'd fill odd corners of the sky with bats. It would be impressive.
It wouldn't be a cottage. It wouldn't have a rather tasteless garden. It wouldn't have a mat in front of the door with 'Welcome' on it.
And after it, mounted on a horse almost as fine as Binky, was a woman. Very definitely. A lot of a woman. She was as much woman as you could get in one place without getting two women.
This was music that had not only escaped but had robbed a bank on the way out. It was music with its sleeves rolled up and its top button undone, raising its hat and grinning and stealing the silver.
The Library didn't only contain magical books, the ones which are chained to their shelves and are very dangerous. It also contained prefectly ordinary books, printed on commonplace pater in mundane ink. It would be a mistake tothink that they weren't also dangerous, just because reading them didn't make fireworks go off in the sky. Reading them sometimes did the more dangerous trick of making fireworks go off in privacy of reader's brain.
For example, the big volume open in front of him contained some of the collected drawings of Leonard of Quirm, skilled artist and certified genius with a mind that wandered so much it came back with souvenirs.
Glod wandered quitely into University Library. Dwarfs respected learning, provided they didn't have to experience it.
Some religions say that universe started with a word, a song, a dance, a piece of music. The Listening Monks of the Ramtop have trained their hearing untill they can tell the value of a playing card by listening to it, and have made it their task to listen intently to the subtle sounds of the universe to pieces together, from the fossil echoes, the very first sounds.
There was certainly, they say, a very strange noice at the beginning of everything.
But the keenest ears (the ones who win most at poker), who listen to the frozen echoes in ammonites and amber, swear they can detect some tiny sounds before that.
It sounded they say, like someone counting: One, Two, Three, Four.
The very best one, who listened to basalt, said he thought he could make out, very faintly, some numbers that came even earlier
When they asked him what it was, he said: sounds like One, Two.
He leaned forward. If his grin had been any wider the top of his head would have fallen off.
Ridcully was beginning to show certain signs. If he head been a volcano, natives living nearby would be looking for a handy virgin.