The Colour of Magic

screamed briefly and scrambled up the ladder after the others.
    Arrows whistled around them as they came out onto the narrow catwalk that led along the spine of the Potent Voyager . Twoflower led the way, jogging along with what Rincewind considered to be too much suppressed excitement.
    Atop the center of the ship was a large round bronze hatch with hasps around it. The troll and the tourist knelt down and started to work on them.
    In the heart of the Potent Voyager fine sand had been trickling into a carefully designed cup for several hours. Now the cup was filled by exactly the right amount to dip down and upset a carefully balanced weight. The weight swung away, pulling a pin from an intricate little mechanism. A chain began to move. There was a clonk …
    “What was that?” said Rincewind urgently. He looked down.
    The hail of arrows had stopped. The crowd of priests and soldiers were standing motionless, staring intently at the ship. A small worried man elbowed his way through them and started to shout something.
    “What was what?” said Twoflower, busy with a wing-nut.
    “I thought I heard something,” said Rincewind. “Look,” he said, “we’ll threaten to damage the thing if they don’t let us go, right? That’s all we’re going to do, right?”
    “Yah,” said Twoflower vaguely. He sat back on his heels. “That’s it,” he said. “It ought to lift off now.”
    Several muscular men were swarming up the ladder to the ship. Rincewind recognized the two chelonauts among them. They were carrying swords.
    “I—” he began.
    The ship lurched. Then, with infinite slowness, it began to move along the rails.
    In that moment of black horror Rincewind saw that Twoflower and the troll had managed to pull the hatch up. A metal ladder inside led into the cabin below. The troll disappeared.
    “We’ve got to get off,” whispered Rincewind. Twoflower looked at him, a strange mad smile on his face.
    “Stars,” said the tourist. “Worlds. The whole damn sky full of worlds. Places no one will ever see. Except me.” He stepped through the hatchway.
    “You’re totally mad,” said Rincewind hoarsely, trying to keep his balance as the ship began to speed up. He turned as one of the chelonauts tried to leap the gap between the Voyager and the tower, landed on the curving flank of the ship, scrabbled for an instant for purchase, failed to find any, and dropped away with a shriek.
    The Voyager was traveling quite fast now. Rincewind could see past Twoflower’s head to the sunlit cloud sea and the impossible Rimbow, floating tantalizingly beyond it, beckoning fools to venture too far…
    He also saw a gang of men climbing desperately over the lower slopes of the launching ramp and manhandling a large bulk of timber onto the track, in a frantic attempt to derail the ship before it vanished over the Edge. The wheels slammed into it, but the only effect was to make the ship rock, Twoflower to lose his grip on the ladder and fall into the cabin, and the hatch to slam down with the horrible sound of a dozen fiddly little catches snapping into place. Rincewind dived forward and scrabbled at them, whimpering.
    The cloud sea was much nearer now. The Edge itself, a rocky perimeter to the arena, was startlingly close.
    Rincewind stood up. There was only one thing to do now, and he did it. He panicked blindly, just as the ship’s bogeys hit the little upgrade and flung it, sparkling like a salmon, into the sky and over the Edge.
    A few seconds later there was a thunder of little feet and the Luggage cleared the rim of the world, legs still pumping determinedly, and plunged down into the universe.
    THE END
    Rincewind woke up and shivered. He was freezing cold.
    So this is it, he thought. When you die you go to a cold, damp, misty freezing place. Hades, where the mournful spirits of the Dead troop forever across the sorrowful marshes, corpse-lights flickering fitfully in the encircling—hang on a minute…
    Surely Hades wasn’t this uncomfortable? And he was very uncomfortable indeed. His back ached where a branch was pressing into it, his legs and arms hurt where the twigs had lacerated them and, judging by the way his head was feeling, something hard had recently hit it. If this was Hades it sure was hell—hang on a minute…
    Tree. He concentrated on the word that floated up from his mind, although the buzzing in his ears and the flashing lights in front of his eyes made this an unexpected achievement. Tree.