| Rite Of Ashkente |
Article Index for Rite Of |
Website Links For Rite |
Information AboutRite Of Ashkente |
|
Since Death is professionally involved in almost everything that is going on everywhere, the Rite is usually performed so that he can be asked questions. Death hates this because he is always summoned at the worst possible time, like when he is at a party. The senior wizards performing the Rite are not too happy about it either, though, since they don't enjoy drawing Death's attention to them; they are often ''very'' senior. Although the Rite can be performed by a couple of people with three small sticks and 4 cc of Mouse Blood or even with a fresh Egg and two small sticks, Wizard s prefer to do it the old fashioned way, with heavy equipment consisting of numerous drippy candles, Octogram s written on the floor, Thurible s and similar paraphernalia. They feel it's not ''proper'' wizardry if it's not showy enough. There are ten more ways of performing the Rite (bringing the total to thirteen), but nine of them cause instant death and the tenth is very hard to remember. The founder of Unseen University Alberto Malich disappeared from the world when he tried to perform the Rite backwards. Apparently, he thought that an inverted Rite of AshkEnte would keep Death ''away'' from him, allowing him to live forever. Unfortunately, what actually happened was that he was summoned ''to'' Death (quite possibly the wizards are trying to work their way around this). He has since elected to stay in Death's domain as Death's manservant (as no time passes there, it might be said that Alberto's ambition of immortality was fulfilled after all). In the '' Discworld '' books, the Rite has been used a number of times:
It would be technically possible to summon The Death Of Rats but this would only be useful if the question could be answered by "Squeak". |
|
|