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He was ready when dusk came. There were plenty of ladders around, and the golems had managed to shore up the floors even up here. Soot covered everything and some rooms opened on to blackness, but he climbed ever up.
He struggled through what remained of the attics, and clambered through a hatch and on to the roof.
There wasn’t much of it. The descent of the rainwater tank had brought down a lot of burning roof with it, and barely a third remained over the great hall. But the fire had hardly touched one of the legs of the U, and the roof there looked sound.
There was one of the old postal pigeon lofts there, and someone had been living in it. That wasn’t too surprising. Far more people wanted to live in Ankh-Morpork than there was Ankh-Morpork for them to live in. There was a whole sub-civilization at rooftop level, up here among the towers and ornamental domes and cupolas and chimneys and—
—clacks towers. That’s right. He’d seen the clacks tower, and someone up here, just before his life had taken a turn for the strange. Why would a loft built for carrier pigeons have a semaphore tower? Surely the pigeons didn’t use it?
Three gargoyles had colonized this one. They liked clacks towers anyway - being up high was what being a gargoyle was all about - and they’d fitted into the system easily. A creature that spent all its time watching and was bright enough to write down a message was a vital component. They didn’t even want paying, and they never got bored. What could possibly bore a creature that was prepared to stare at the same thing for years at a time?
Around the city, the clacks towers were lighting up. Only the University, the Palace, the Guilds and the seriously rich or very nervous ran their towers at night, but the big terminal tower on the Tump blazed like a Hogswatch tree. Patterns of yellow squares ran up and down the main tower. Silent at this distance, winking their signals above the rising mists, outlining their constellations against the evening sky, the towers were more magical than magic, more bewitching than witchcraft.
Moist stared.
What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird drawings in old books and in the wrong hands it was dangerous as hell, but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands. The universe was full of the stuff; it made the stars stay up and the feet stay down.
But what was happening now... this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They’d cursed and, worse, used logarithms. They’d waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. They hadn’t dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they’d imagined a different world, and bent metal round it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this... thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight.
The mist was tilling the streets now, leaving the buildings like islands in surf.