Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett Page A

a bit technical.”
    Ridcully squinted through the keyhole.
    “He’s lying down again” he said. He got up, brushing the dust off his knees, and grasped the door handle. “Right,” he said. “Take your time from me. One…two…”
    Modo the gardener was trundling a barrow load of hedge trimmings to a bonfire behind the new High Energy Magic research building when about half a dozen wizards went past at, for wizards, high speed. Windle Poons was being borne aloft between them.
    Modo heard him say, “Really, Archchancellor, are you quite sure this one will work—?”
    “We’ve got your best interests at heart,” said Ridcully.
    “I’m sure, but—”
    “We’ll soon have you feeling your old self again,” said the Bursar.
    “No, we won’t,” hissed the Dean. “That’s the whole point!”
    “We’ll soon have you not feeling your old self again, that’s the whole point,” stuttered the Bursar, as they rounded the corner.
    Modo picked up the handles of the barrow again and pushed it thoughtfully toward the secluded area where he kept his bonfire, his compost heaps, his leaf-mold pile, and the little shed he sat in when it rained.
    He used to be assistant gardener at the palace, but this job was a lot more interesting. You really got to see life.

    Ankh-Morpork society is street society. There is always something interesting going on. At the moment, the driver of a two-horse fruit wagon was holding the Dean six inches in the air by the scruff of the Dean’s robe and was threatening to push the Dean’s face through the back of the Dean’s head.
    “It’s peaches, right?” he kept bellowing. “You know what happens to peaches what lies around too long? They get bruised . Lots of things around here are going to get bruised .”
    “I am a wizard, you know,” said the Dean, his pointy shoes dangling. “If it wasn’t for the fact that it would be against the rules for me to use magic in anything except a purely defensive manner, you would definitely be in a lot of trouble.”
    “What you doing, anyway?” said the driver, lowering the Dean so he could look suspiciously over his shoulder.
    “Yeah,” said a man trying to control the team pulling a lumber wagon, “what’s going on? There’s people here being paid by the hour, you know!”
    “Move along at the front there!”
    The lumber driver turned in his seat and addressed the queue of carts behind him. “I’m trying to,” he said. “It’s not my fault, is it? There’s a load of wizards digging up the godsdamn street !”
    The Archchancellor’s muddy face peered over the edge of the hole.
    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Dean,” he said, “I told you to sort things out!”
    “Yes, I was just asking this gentleman to back up and go another way,” said the Dean, who was afraid he was beginning to choke.
    The fruiterer turned him around so that he could see along the crowded streets. “Ever tried to back up sixty carts all at once?” he demanded. “It’s not easy. Especially when everyone can’t move because you guys have got it so’s the carts are backed up all around the block and no one can move because everyone’s in someone else’s way, right?”
    The Dean tried to nod. He had wondered himself about the wisdom of digging the hole at the junction of the Street of Small Gods and Broad Way, two of the busiest streets in Ankh-Morpork. It had seemed logical at the time. Even the most persistent undead ought to stay decently buried under that amount of traffic. The only problem was that no one had thought seriously about the difficulty of digging up a couple of main streets during the busy time of day.
    “All right, all right, what’s going on here?”
    The crowd of spectators opened to admit the bulky figure of Sergeant Colon of the Watch. He moved through the people unstoppably, his stomach leading the way. When he saw the wizards, waist deep in a hole in the middle of the road, his huge red face brightened up.
    “What’s this,