'I don't like it, Two-bee,' IIa quavered. 'Let's just leave the stone here, shall we? I'm sure it'll be all right, and in the morning we can send a gang up here, they'll know exactly what-'
His words were drowned out as another flare crackled across the sky and hit the column of dancing air fifty feet above them. He grabbed part of the scaffolding.
'Sod take this,' he said. 'I'm off.'
'Hang on a minute,' said IIb. 'I mean, what is creaking? Stone can't creak.'
'The whole bloody scaffolding is moving, don't be daft!' He stared goggle-eyed at his brother. 'Tell me it's the scaffolding,' he pleaded.
'No, I'm certain this time. It's coming from inside.' They stared at one another, and then at the rickety ladder leading up to the tip, or to where the tip should be.
'Come on!' said IIb. 'It can't flare off, it's trying to find ways of discharging-'
There was a sound as loud as the groaning of continents.
Teppic felt it. He felt that his skin was several sizes too small. He felt that someone was holding his ears and trying to twist his head off.
He saw the guard captain sag to his knees, fighting to get his helmet off, and he leapt the stall.
Tried to leap the stall. Everything was wrong, and he landed heavily on a floor that seemed undecided about becoming a wall. He managed to get to his feet and was pulled sideways, dancing awkwardly across the stable to keep his balance.
The stables stretched and shrank like a picture in a distorting mirror. He'd gone to see some once in Ankh, the three of them hazarding a half-coin each to visit the transient marvels of Dr Mooner's Travelling Take Your Breath Away Emporium. But you knew then that it was only twisted glass that was giving you a head like a sausage and legs like footballs. Teppic wished he could be so certain that what was happening around him would allow of such a harmless explanation. You'd probably need a wobbly glass mirror to make it look normal.
He ran on taffy legs towards Ptraci and the high priest as the world was expanded and squeezed around him, and was momentarily gratified to see the girl squirm in Dios's grip and fetch him a tidy thump on the ear.
He moved as though in a dream, with the distances changing as though reality was an elastic thing. Another step sent him cannoning into the pair of them. He grabbed Ptraci's arm and staggered back to the camel stall, where the creature was still cudding and watching the scene with the nearest thing a camel will ever get to mild interest, and snatched its halter.
No-one seemed to be interested in stopping them as they helped each other through the doorway and out into the mad night.
'It helps if you shut your eyes,' said Ptraci.
Teppic tried it. It worked. A stretch of courtyard that his eyes told him was a quivering rectangle whose sides twanged like bowstrings became, well, just a courtyard under his feet.
'Gosh, that was clever,' he said. 'How did you think of that?'
'I always shut my eyes when I'm frightened,' said Ptraci.
'Good plan.'
'What's happening?'
'I don't know. I don't want to find out. I think going away from here could be an amazingly sensible idea. How do you make a camel kneel, did you say? I've got any amount of sharp things.'
The camel, who had a very adequate grasp of human language as it applied to threats, knelt down graciously. They scrambled aboard and the landscape lurched again as the beast jacked itself back on to its feet.
The camel knew perfectly well what was happening. Three stomachs and a digestive system like an industrial distillation plant gave you a lot of time for sitting and thinking.
It's not for nothing that advanced mathematics tends to be invented in hot countries. It's because of the morphic resonance of all the camels, who have that disdainful expression and famous curled lip as a natural result of an ability to do quadratic equations.
It's not generally realised that camels have a natural aptitude for advanced mathematics, particularly where they involve ballistics. This evolved as a survival trait, in the same way as a human's hand and eye co-ordination, a chameleon's camouflage and a dolphin's renowned ability to save drowning swimmers if there's any chance that biting them in half might be observed and commented upon adversely by other humans.
The fact is that camels are far more intelligent than dolphins.[21]
They are so much brighter that they soon realised that the most prudent thing any intelligent animal can do, if it would prefer its descendants not to spend a lot of time on a slab with electrodes clamped to their brains or sticking mines on the bottom of ships or being patronised rigid by zoologists, is to make bloody certain humans don't find out about it. So they long ago plumped for a lifestyle that, in return for a certain amount of porterage and being prodded with sticks, allowed them adequate food and grooming and the chance to spit in a human's eye and get away with it.
And this particular camel, the result of millions of years of selective evolution to produce a creature that could count the grains of sand it was walking over, and close its nostrils at will, and survive under the broiling sun for many days without water, was called You Bastard.
And he was, in fact, the greatest mathematician in the world.