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I imagine the Discworld's take on the tarot cards might be the Thorough Deck.
And if the wizards are going to develop them, it would be fitting that the Major Arkane cards of the deck might include The Breakfast Card (the way other decks would include The Lovers, but the Wizards are militantly celibate, and almost as belligerently gourmands). This card did NOT show up in Sayed's casting of Thorrin's fortune.
From Lapidary III: In TransitThough he remained sure they were malfunctioning hallucinations, and suspicious ones at that, the saint did allow them to gift him a butt of water, a barrel of dried fruit, and a ham. Thorrin also replaced the tent with fresh canvas and new ropes. Inga just stared. “Is he crazy?” she whispered.“He’s out of his batshit mind!” the hermit yelled. “But can you BLAME him? A cup of blood costs THREE QUARTS downtown, but on the Hill it’s a Flower!”“Hill? What hill?” Inga asked.“THAT is the part you want explained?” Earlinda asked her.“I, uh, well, um.” she flustered.Thorrin finished his work and stepped over to the crazy man. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir, you’re Inga’s first saint.”“Probably the last one, too, unless you idiots turn a little Hubwards on the next rise. You’re headed straight for the war zone around Harib. More to the right, cut through Djelibeybi and Tsort, then up the Nazrat river. Its headwaters are just inside Howandaland." He stopped talking and scratched his ear. “Mind the turns, elephants slip on the red rocks unless you paint their toenails.”“Um…thanks?” Thorrin tried. Sounded right. He’d have to look at a map. And at the beasts’ toenails, he decided. Then they were up and away, while Saint Walter prayed. He wasn’t a supernatural creature, just blessed, so his mind retained their images very clearly. They were just filed beside so much utter madness no one would ever accidentally come across them.----- Thorrin hadn’t told anyone at University where he was going. Or even that he was going. He just disappeared. There was a brief visit to the University at sunrise on the day. He left his elephant double-parked while he attended the bare minimum details of another sabbatical.He had taken a moment to write new names on the schedule for all his classes. Several wizards were surprised to be woken up and told they were late for their lecture.They assumed someone had delivered a Manifesto and gone off to seek his Origin. It happened, it shook up the schedules, people dealt. Just no one could tell you WHO exactly had gone off to be a Mad Wizard.In fact, the only reason anyone noticed Thorrin was gone was because Inga wasn’t helping and Refuge wasn’t trapping. The Archchancellor brought this up with his Council. “Where’s Inga’s boss gone? Whossname, Thor?”[1]“No one knows where Master Animator Thorrin has gone, sir,” Divan Jerichotree enunciated.“Well, how can we find him?” Mustrum asked. He was not the sort of administrator to believe any part of the University’s business was beyond his compass. Including the private lives of all his faculty.[2]“I dare say if he wanted us to know where he was going, he’d had told us he was going,” Sayed Al-Rayet pointed out. He was thinking about his fellow wizard’s meticulous arrangements just for an afternoon taking Inga to see the sights. Plus, he’d have either taken the Discpiece in his office, or given it to someone.“I didn’t ask what HE wanted,” Ridcully snorted. “I asked how WE can find him! He’s one of my- OUR wizards! He could be in trouble!”“I’d say that a great number of people think Thorrin IS trouble, sir,” said Ponder Stibbons. He was thinking of some of the reports that had turned up describing Thorrin’s interaction with four authentic Seriphs inside of twenty minutes, three of them rapidly succeeding as Seriph.“Yes,” added the Dean. “If he feels he can handle whatever called him away, it would be rude of us to jostle his elbow, as it were.” The Dean was thinking of arriving on the scene where someone who rode a Sphinx needed help. The Bursar contributed, “Elephants slip on the red rocks unless you paint their toenails.”“His medication is in his upper pocket,” Ridcully told the wizard sitting beside the Bursar. He glared around the table. “Well, we still have to find him. What’s our best bet? Divination?”“Sir,” Sayed said cautiously. “I cast his horoscope this morning. It’s blank.”Ridcully waved that aside. “Horoscopes are always vague, that’s how they work.”“No, sir,” Sayed said more firmly. “I do not mean the message was unhelpful. I mean the result of my calculation was blank paper.”“What were you using?” Ponder asked. “Magic ink?”“Charcoal,” Sayed snapped. He pulled out a deck of Thorough Cards. “And when I went to back up the results…” He spread the stack on the table. Everyone recognized the four suits of the Thorough Deck: the wizards’ staves of knowledge; the wizards’ hats of conflict; the witches’ brooms of emotions; and the serving platters of wealth. To a man, the wizards leaned forward, scanning the deck for the more dramatic cards. “Where’s the Emperor?” one asked.“Where’s Death?” another.“I don’t see The Black Castle.”“Or the Breakfast card.”“Or Second Breakfast.”“That’s because I don’t have the Major Arkane anymore,” Sayed said, tossing a smaller stack of cards down. They were blank. All of them showed a pure white surface. “Whatever’s going on, it’s masking Thorrin’s future from scrutiny.” He turned to the Archchancellor. “I don’t know who or what’s behind this, but I’m not poking that with any stick I want to have afterwards.”“Maybe,” Divan suggested, “we could stand by in readiness in case HE contacts US?”“That’s… That’s a plan,” Ridcully acknowledged. ----- The rest of the trip through Omnia, Ephebe, and Djelibeybi was uneventful. Even after they left the Wasteland Proper, they were in the Sub-Wasteland. Anyone traveling there just assumed anyone else had a good reason to be incredibly far from the trappings of civilization. If you were avoiding accessible water, predictable food, lasting shade, or human contact, you probably didn’t want to talk about why.So for a while they saw a few people, mostly alone, who disappeared right after they were seen.Then they reached Tsort. “We’ve reached Tsort!” Earlinda announced from the driver’s seat. Inga turned to her, “How do you know?”She pointed to a rise ahead of them. “Well, that MIGHT be the Great Wall of Djelibeybi, or the Great Wall of Elharib-““I get it,” Inga muttered.“Or the Great Wall of Ur. But the only one that’s actually on the MAP-““I said I get it!”“Aw, are you feeling out of tsorts?” Earlinda asked innocently.“We are just outside of Tsort,” Thorrin said, stepping out of Refuge, and pointing at the wall.“AAAAAAAAAARGH!” Inga growled, jumping down to walk alongside the elephants.“What’s she so tshort about?” Thorrin asked, equally innocently. Then ducked as Inga lobbed a rock past his head. The Wall of Tsort was a formidable barrier between Tsort and their traditional enemy, Ephebe.[3]Most of the wall wasn’t patrolled. It seemed redundant, at least in this part, except in times of heightened tensions (or tshortened tempers).. No one wanted to spend the time or effort to get an entire army across the wastes unless they’d budgeted for a whole war. “We need a gate,” Thorrin said. He looked Hubwards and Rimwards. “Any guesses?”“Does it matter?” Earlinda asked. “We’re not in a critical race against time or water supplies.”“No,” Inga said, “but Refuge IS getting Tsunburnt.” The other two spun around, worry on their faces, to inspect the little shelter. Which sat there, looking the same as it always had, of course. Then they realized what she’d said and turned to glare. “What? Are you going to be poor tsports about this?” They continued to glare. “Took me HOURS to think that one up.”She slumped at the back of the platform, legs hanging over Tharl’s back. “REFUGE thought it was funny.”“Inga,” Thorrin said in a lecturing tone, “a friend’s health is not the tsort of thing to joke about.”“Yeah,” Earlinda agreed. “We try to be tsupportive."They turned back to discussing directions before they broke out in giggles. Inga joined them and they turned right. “Towards the Tseaports on the Tcircle Tsea!”----- Just before noon they reached the Gate, and the associated border town, Tsallyport. They couldn’t see any movement on the road up to the gate, the town beyond the gate, or the Wall over the gate.Inga hoped the gate guardians were well-rested. The Ankh-Morporkians looked at the stillness and worried the guards would resent having to work because some strangers turned up, as they would have been at home.There were only two guards visible when they rode up. They were sitting comfortably in a shaded spot just beyond the portcullis. A barracks just past the gate had a rack of spears and pikes that indicated more men could be summoned quickly.They looked at the elephants with mild interest. They did not come out of the shade. The trio climbed down to lean a bit out of the sun and talk.“Who are you?” a guard asked.“We’re merchants,” Thorrin said. “Where you guys from?” one asked. “Ankh-Morpork,” Thorrin replied automatically. Earlinda shook her head, an entire background wasted. She must to teach this man subterfuge if she had to nail it into his skull. “Get out,” the guard said. “They got elephants in Ankh-Morpork?”“They have EVERYTHING in Ankh-Morpork,” Earlinda said. “For the right price.”“I have heard that,” the second guard said. “So where are you going with these Ankh-Morpork elephants?”“Howandaland,” Earlinda replied. “Why are you taking elephants TO Howandaland guard number one asked. “They have hundreds!”“Thousands,” the other guard corrected.“I don’t know about that. I hear tell they’ve suffered a pachyderm population depression following M’Bu’s Folly.”“That’s true.”“Who’s M’Bu?” Inga asked.“Crazy guy, rounded up a thousand elephants and took ‘em off to some foreign place.”“Why?”“Why else? To sell ‘em.”“Do you know where he took them?” Thorrin asked.“Well, that’d be Ankh-“ And that’s when the penny dropped. “You’ve got THOSE elephants? Heck, the betting was on the herd dying on the way there!”“Dying?” Thorrin asked innocently. The other two looked as innocent as they possibly could. “No, they’re perfectly fine.”“Ain’t that a kick in the head!” the other guard said. They all laughed about that. Then the guards looked serious. “Okay,” the first one said, “That’s the most fascinating thing to happen in or through the Tsallyport in my whole enlistment. We’re supposed to inspect you, your goods, your howdah, but…”“It’s hot,” the second said. “Now, we are rational men. And this IS Tsort, home of logical analysis. If you can come up with a logical puzzle we haven’t heard of-““That CAN be solved,” the first added.“Well, that goes without saying,” the second said. “If it can’t be solved it’s not a logical puzzle.”“Depends on your definition of puzzle. Some things are unsolvable, but very puzzling.”“I’m going to refute your mug with a brick.”“Ahem!” Inga said, waving her hand. “A train leaves Bonk, traveling at 35 miles per hour. At the same time, a train leaves Ankh-Morpork on the same track, moving at 40 miles per hour-““What’s a train?” the first guard asked.“What’s a Beyunk?” the second asked.“What’s a mile?”“What’s a track?”Ten minutes later, they had blown the alert whistle and turned out the whole garrison. All twenty men stood outside the gate, watching Inga draw her problem on the Wall’s Ephebe side, just Hubwards of Gate Tsallyport.Earlinda was compiling a glossary on the Rimwards side of the gate. Thorrin got some paper from Snarl’s load and offered it to people trying to write calculations in the fine sand beside the road.----- Mother Hogany waved her hand and the wagons stopped. She gazed up at the towering Mountains of the Sun, the range across the Hub end of Howandaland. The upper half was so high that it was permanently covered in snow. “We wait here,” she said.“Here?” Number Three asked.“Here. This will be best.” She gestured for them to set up camp. The rest of the coven staked out the tents, while her husbands unloaded the wagons.“Are they coming through the mountains…here?” Number One asked. “Is there a secret pass?”“They’re coming over the mountains. Here. Without a pass.” She sounded confident. Of course, as a witch, she always made sure to sound confident.Number Two was still not sure. “How can you be so sure? You said the wizard’s future was hidden.”“It is,” she told him. Then she pat him on the head. “But mine is not.”“What about the yetis?” Two persisted.“Their future is also clear,” Mother smiled. “Just short. Now, hurry, I wish to be in bed in an hour.”“Mother, it’s only just past noon.”“I did not say I wished to sleep in an hour,” she pointed out. Two was her biggest husband, but also the dumbest one. ----- A benefit of traveling through Tsort was that they got a chance to worship. Some Tsorteans claimed their land to be the source of religion and there was at least one temple to every religious tradition they’d ever heard about somewhere in the country.Thorrin found several temples to Libertina. He bought a formal sacrifice from the temple and was pretty sure he felt the blasting wind of her regard from the altar. He tipped heavily for the efforts of the guys on the bellows below the nave.Inga managed to find one temple that offered to act as intercessor to any gods or goddesses that did their divine thing from snow-covered peaks. She prayed to Urika and really thought she felt a chill. Earlinda tried one of the many temples to Anoia and may have received a vision. She thought she heard someone in the distance screaming what sounded like ‘What?’ and ‘We have a bad connection!’ “What connection?” she muttered for days after. “Physical? Spiritual? WHAT!?!”….. Mistress X of Borogravia External Intelligence sat at her desk doing paperwork. These days, there was always paperwork. How long had it been since she’d been in the field? Good Seth, had it been two husbands ago?One of her junior analysts entered the room. She had an open-door policy. There were no doors inside the entire building. Never could be sure who might be hiding behind one. For a similar reason, all the desks were trestle tables.“I might have found a lead on our wizard,” D stated.“Really?” She didn’t get her hopes up. She went through this eight times a week. “Tell me more.”“Apparently there’s a group from Ankh-Morpork crossing Tsort, could be headed towards Howandaland.”“So far so good,” X commented. She waited for the disappointment.“A couple and their servant,” D continued. They were noted because they’re paying their custom fees, bridge tolls, and road tax with story problems.”“They solve them?”“They hand them out. Then stay until everyone knows how to solve them. You know what Tsortean are like with puzzles. But it’s weird, right?”“Very weird,” she had to agree. She had known this would happen a lot when she tasked the field agents with reporting anything ‘out of the ordinary.' But she’d hoped for better filtering in the outer office.“Worth scrutiny, anyway,” X allowed. “See if anyone can pick up their trail and get a closer look.”“That’ll be easy, they’ll just follow the elephants.”For the first time, X put down the report she was scanning. She clasped her hands together on her desk. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”“Elenhants. Five of them. They’ve got a regular caravan headed to the Temple, looks like,” D explained.X nodded, then smiled. “Okay, for your in-rating professional development as an analyst, I want you to work on your reporting. This was like pulling teeth.” And how long had it been since she’d had that opportunity, either!“So go out in the hallway, compose yourself, and summarize everything you’ve told me into a concise expository lump.”“Yes, Mistress, thank you.” He stepped out. She went back to her reading, but kept an ear out. Eventually she heard what she’d been waiting for, the slap of a hand against a forehead. And a sad, slow groan. “COME!” she commanded.D slunk back into her office. She looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, ma’am. It has come to my attention that the richest man alive ran off to join a math circus, and is sneaking through the most militarized nation on the continent, making sure to draw the attention, and fix himself in the memory, of every official in the country.”“And your recommendation?”“That I go back to work and stop wasting your time.”“That’s the benefit of a good summary,” she said with a smile. “The quicker you deliver it, the less of my time you use. And very likely, when you practice it, you won’t waste ANY of my time.” She smiled again to show she wasn’t mad, then waved him away.“Elephants,” she muttered as she went back to her reports.----- Tsort had occasional tiffs with Klatch, but not enough to justify extending the Great Wall around to that side of the country. Tharl passed the last customs shack and descended to the wadi that acted as a semi-official border between the two nations.“What’s a wadi?” Inga asked.“It’s a riverbed that is only sometimes under a river,” Thorrin explained. He let Tharl get close to the bottom of the border. “Think of it as a very shallow valley, or a very wide ditch.”A small, slow stream coursed along the bottom of the wadi. “This one is named Wadi Eugh-No,” Earlinda said. “This side is Tsort, that side is Klatch.”“OH! We know people in Klatch!”“None of whom would welcome us involving them,” Thorrin said. He turned the caravan rimwards, following the path of the water. “This goes to Howandaland?” Inga asked.“The headwaters of this river are just below the Mountains of the Sun,” he explained. “This water used to be part of a glacier, more than likely.” “And where are we going through the Mountains?” Earlinda asked, glancing at the map. There were no roads anywhere near the river, but that wasn’t definitive. On the Disc, cartography was still largely a participatory discipline, and sometimes researchers didn’t make it back to the publisher.“I was planning to just power up them,” Thorrin said confidently. Inga and Earlinda both groaned. “What? It’s not arrogance, it’s an established technique! That’s how we got out of the ravine the day you and I met!”“I doubt Jarl’s caboosenbumpen will be anywhere near as enticing,” Inga said.----- It took them two days to reach the Mountains of the Sun. Thorrin halted Tharl and pointed. “History repeats itself.”The other two looked up and down the mountain before them. “This is history?” Earlinda asked.“Bobsleds! When they brough the elephants to Dibbler, M'Bu's Folly, they came down these mountains on wooden sleds. Basically two-elephant bobsleds. See the runs?” He sighed happily.Earlinda could only see very jagged rocks covered with very jagged ice. Looked like dangerous danger with danger sprinkled over the top. She began thinking about spending this part of the trip inside Refuge, hiding under a bed.Inga, a mountain girl from way back, quickly noted the deep gouges made in the side of the mountain before them. They skewed left and right, a bit, at the very top, but then the lines became straight like a bowling alley. Once ten or twelve tons of elephant got up to speed, there wasn’t a lot that was going to stop them. Or turn them. Or slow them down.Even after the ice ended, the grooves continued. But they weren’t worn into the rock as much as violently pounded through the rock. So the grooves were just as jagged as the rocks around them.“How did they teach the elephants to bobsled?” she asked. Thorrin shrugged. “Probably the same way Vikings learn the way to Fallhalla.”The intermittent river of Wadi Eugh-No didn’t have headwaters as much as treadwaters. Meltwater coursed down the agitated slopes of this side of the Mountains of God range, hanging out at the foothills like disappointed teens hoping for a dance or a riot. When enough water got bored there, it started to slouch over to the Wadi, then wander down through Al-Khali, and on to the Circle Sea.They camped for the night at the side of an almost watered lake. Thorrin joked about raising the dead river from the bed with his necromancy.The others just looked around at the silent, brooding foothills and shivered.Early the next morning, Inga volunteered to scout a path and set off, riding Varl and singing a hiking hymn to Urika.They let her get a ways a head and followed. They were about half a mile up the slope when it became too steep to stay on the driving bench. Thorrin moved to Jarl, Earlinda rode Carl.This went a bit easier. And like Inga’s first act as a zombie, they elephants just pounded their way up. They kicked footholds into the rock, then into the ice. The stomping feet woke up two yeti up above them on the ice. Or in the ice, really. Yeti are ambush predators, hiding in snowbanks or ice fields until their prey comes close. They’re a form of troll, well adapted to the altitude of year-round glaciers. Living rock beings that can’t actually benefit from eating flesh, but they never let that stop them.These two watched the strange creatures approach. The last trolls to claim this area had done the exact same thing. Except in their case, the elephants were screaming down the mountain, not climbing up it. And no matter what you’re made of, taking seventeen hundred stone of elephant to the face isn’t good for your face. Or anything attached to it.These yetis had just found an empty part of the range, unclaimed and unguarded. They’d enjoyed a profitable few years on the slope, and never really wondered why no one had been hunting there until they showed up.Today, the elephants approached at just above a decent walking rate. They didn’t even give the yetis pause.[4] They readied themselves for the first one, way out ahead of the rest.Inga wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t like the path she was on. The groove she’d been following seemed to be partially filled in.She considered the rest of the slope, then turned Varl around. The yetis could not resist the combined advantage of surprise and an attack from the rear, and leapt up out of their hiding snow.Thorrin wasn’t a troll expert, but part of the basic education of wizards is recognizing hazards in the wild. They learn how to best deal with trolls on day two.[5] Troll life is based on silicon. They’re rather like large, uncooperative computers. The colder their brains get, the easier their thoughts travel. The warmer they get, the less efficiently their nerves work.Thorrin saw the creatures erupt into view, identified them as trolls, and cast a heat spell. He barely stopped himself from throwing a fireball, as Inga was in the way.He just heated up the immediate area of the two trolls. With necrothaum in his panic. That meant ‘immediate area’ extended one glacier in any direction. And the results were instant.One second he was riding an elephant almost straight up into the air; the next he was swimming through a waterfall, diving down the side of the mountain.The water surged back and forth, he flailed arms and legs, and wondered if he knew a good spell that could be cast while drowning.Then someone grabbed his arm. He was being rescued. He went instantly limp so as not to interfere.Earlinda screamed at him, “You have to HELP! Jackass! Grab a rock!” He instantly turned, climbing uphill and swimming upstream, and with her help found his way onto an outcropping. He flopped across it, watching the waters continue to froth.“Sorry,” he eventually gasped. “I’m just accustomed to being saved by Inga.”“She saw me moving towards you and went to save Refuge,” Earlinda coughed back.“Ah.” They eventually sat up, looking downhill. Way down at the bottom, one foothill rose above the floodwaters. Inga waved from the top of the hill. All the elephants were there, looking complete. Refuge also looked to be unharmed, though it was hard to be sure from this far away. Inga was obviously waiting for the waters to recede so they could recover all the lost ground.“Sorry,” Earlinda said.“What? What do you have to be sorry about?” Thorrin asked, confused.“That day I caught up with you? Got you dressed as a merchant?” She shook her head. “Wasn’t worried about you being identified. I wanted to get the staff away from you.”“Okay,” Thorrin nodded, still confused.“Every day. Every single day. We got up, we ate, we went outside… And I made sure you didn’t have the staff.“You’re a gods damned disaster with that staff.”“I-“ he protested.“Don’t get me wrong,” she overrode. “You’ve saved my city, my life, my friends. Heck, even my career. But on the most secret mission I’ve EVER been on, you’ve managed to DEVESTATE a mountain range, even without your staff.“And I’m sorry. I should have done something… I don’t know what, but something to at least cap your power.” She slumped in place, a profile of dejection, a trophy of failure.Thorrin reached into his pocket and took out two sticks of chalk. He handed them over to the assessin.“What? A symbolic gesture?”“No,” he sighed. “I’m giving you a cap to my power. You make an excellent argument.” He pointed in the distance where the waters were flowing. They were high enough to make out the grooves the bobsleds had bored to the sort-of lake all those years ago. They gave the water channels, and an interesting visual effect.“Plus, the word ‘disaster’ is not out of place.”“You can’t cast magic with chalk, even I know that,” she pointed out.“I can,” he said. “That’s what I used for…” He gestured around them to encompass the slopes and the rapidly draining lake.Eyes wide in surprise, Earlinda pocketed the sticks. “Thank you, Thorrin. A little late, maybe, but thank you.” They sat in silence, waiting for their baths to climb up to them.----- The Lesser Vizier of Hersheba was startled when his Chief Cook[6] climbed in through the window. “Just once, the door! I beg you!”“Sorry, just got news.”“The hallway is on fire?”“What? No, we may have a clue. About the powerful wizard everyone’s looking for!”“What’s the clue?” LVoH asked.“Someone melted half the mountain range in Hubwards Howandaland.""Which half?""The half towards," and he made the gesture of cursing towards the hated enemy nation of Klatch.“Then it’s not the wizard,” Lesser said. “But such a powerful magic!” CC protested.“It’s probably just that…” He searched his large and colorful vocabulary for the worst possible insult. “Woman over in,” gesture of cursing towards Klatch and the Seriph who leads it. “She’s probably trying to irrigate her widdershins lands in the off season.”“We’ve heard nothing through our networks,” CC insisted.“Then get back over there and find out why we haven’t!” LV snapped. CC ducked his head and dove through the window, on his way to the hated gesture country. [1] Ridcully knew exactly who he was asking about, but didn’t want anyone thinking he’d been impressed by the stunt with the Sphinx. [2] Possibly excepting the Librarian. But Ridcully ever really tried to pry, so he was never told to toddle on. [3] It was built on the border between Tsort and Djelibeybi, but it faced Ephebe in that direction, too, over beyond Djelibeybi, and you just can’t be too careful. [4] Not that yetis are known for their evaluation of consequences. [5] Day one is about price-gouging eateries along the road. [6] The founders of Hersheba’s intelligence network felt that giving their chief spy the title, Chief Spy, would give too much information away. The fact that all the royal cooks are trained Assassins, enter and exit rooms by window, travel on rooftop, and speak fourteen language is never seen as equally obvious.

Description
I imagine the Discworld's take on the tarot cards might be the Thorough Deck.
And if the wizards are going to develop them, it would be fitting that the Major Arkane cards of the deck might include The Breakfast Card (the way other decks would include The Lovers, but the Wizards are militantly celibate, and almost as belligerently gourmands). This card did NOT show up in Sayed's casting of Thorrin's fortune.
From Lapidary III: In TransitThough he remained sure they were malfunctioning hallucinations, and suspicious ones at that, the saint did allow them to gift him a butt of water, a barrel of dried fruit, and a ham. Thorrin also replaced the tent with fresh canvas and new ropes. Inga just stared. “Is he crazy?” she whispered.“He’s out of his batshit mind!” the hermit yelled. “But can you BLAME him? A cup of blood costs THREE QUARTS downtown, but on the Hill it’s a Flower!”“Hill? What hill?” Inga asked.“THAT is the part you want explained?” Earlinda asked her.“I, uh, well, um.” she flustered.Thorrin finished his work and stepped over to the crazy man. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir, you’re Inga’s first saint.”“Probably the last one, too, unless you idiots turn a little Hubwards on the next rise. You’re headed straight for the war zone around Harib. More to the right, cut through Djelibeybi and Tsort, then up the Nazrat river. Its headwaters are just inside Howandaland." He stopped talking and scratched his ear. “Mind the turns, elephants slip on the red rocks unless you paint their toenails.”“Um…thanks?” Thorrin tried. Sounded right. He’d have to look at a map. And at the beasts’ toenails, he decided. Then they were up and away, while Saint Walter prayed. He wasn’t a supernatural creature, just blessed, so his mind retained their images very clearly. They were just filed beside so much utter madness no one would ever accidentally come across them.----- Thorrin hadn’t told anyone at University where he was going. Or even that he was going. He just disappeared. There was a brief visit to the University at sunrise on the day. He left his elephant double-parked while he attended the bare minimum details of another sabbatical.He had taken a moment to write new names on the schedule for all his classes. Several wizards were surprised to be woken up and told they were late for their lecture.They assumed someone had delivered a Manifesto and gone off to seek his Origin. It happened, it shook up the schedules, people dealt. Just no one could tell you WHO exactly had gone off to be a Mad Wizard.In fact, the only reason anyone noticed Thorrin was gone was because Inga wasn’t helping and Refuge wasn’t trapping. The Archchancellor brought this up with his Council. “Where’s Inga’s boss gone? Whossname, Thor?”[1]“No one knows where Master Animator Thorrin has gone, sir,” Divan Jerichotree enunciated.“Well, how can we find him?” Mustrum asked. He was not the sort of administrator to believe any part of the University’s business was beyond his compass. Including the private lives of all his faculty.[2]“I dare say if he wanted us to know where he was going, he’d had told us he was going,” Sayed Al-Rayet pointed out. He was thinking about his fellow wizard’s meticulous arrangements just for an afternoon taking Inga to see the sights. Plus, he’d have either taken the Discpiece in his office, or given it to someone.“I didn’t ask what HE wanted,” Ridcully snorted. “I asked how WE can find him! He’s one of my- OUR wizards! He could be in trouble!”“I’d say that a great number of people think Thorrin IS trouble, sir,” said Ponder Stibbons. He was thinking of some of the reports that had turned up describing Thorrin’s interaction with four authentic Seriphs inside of twenty minutes, three of them rapidly succeeding as Seriph.“Yes,” added the Dean. “If he feels he can handle whatever called him away, it would be rude of us to jostle his elbow, as it were.” The Dean was thinking of arriving on the scene where someone who rode a Sphinx needed help. The Bursar contributed, “Elephants slip on the red rocks unless you paint their toenails.”“His medication is in his upper pocket,” Ridcully told the wizard sitting beside the Bursar. He glared around the table. “Well, we still have to find him. What’s our best bet? Divination?”“Sir,” Sayed said cautiously. “I cast his horoscope this morning. It’s blank.”Ridcully waved that aside. “Horoscopes are always vague, that’s how they work.”“No, sir,” Sayed said more firmly. “I do not mean the message was unhelpful. I mean the result of my calculation was blank paper.”“What were you using?” Ponder asked. “Magic ink?”“Charcoal,” Sayed snapped. He pulled out a deck of Thorough Cards. “And when I went to back up the results…” He spread the stack on the table. Everyone recognized the four suits of the Thorough Deck: the wizards’ staves of knowledge; the wizards’ hats of conflict; the witches’ brooms of emotions; and the serving platters of wealth. To a man, the wizards leaned forward, scanning the deck for the more dramatic cards. “Where’s the Emperor?” one asked.“Where’s Death?” another.“I don’t see The Black Castle.”“Or the Breakfast card.”“Or Second Breakfast.”“That’s because I don’t have the Major Arkane anymore,” Sayed said, tossing a smaller stack of cards down. They were blank. All of them showed a pure white surface. “Whatever’s going on, it’s masking Thorrin’s future from scrutiny.” He turned to the Archchancellor. “I don’t know who or what’s behind this, but I’m not poking that with any stick I want to have afterwards.”“Maybe,” Divan suggested, “we could stand by in readiness in case HE contacts US?”“That’s… That’s a plan,” Ridcully acknowledged. ----- The rest of the trip through Omnia, Ephebe, and Djelibeybi was uneventful. Even after they left the Wasteland Proper, they were in the Sub-Wasteland. Anyone traveling there just assumed anyone else had a good reason to be incredibly far from the trappings of civilization. If you were avoiding accessible water, predictable food, lasting shade, or human contact, you probably didn’t want to talk about why.So for a while they saw a few people, mostly alone, who disappeared right after they were seen.Then they reached Tsort. “We’ve reached Tsort!” Earlinda announced from the driver’s seat. Inga turned to her, “How do you know?”She pointed to a rise ahead of them. “Well, that MIGHT be the Great Wall of Djelibeybi, or the Great Wall of Elharib-““I get it,” Inga muttered.“Or the Great Wall of Ur. But the only one that’s actually on the MAP-““I said I get it!”“Aw, are you feeling out of tsorts?” Earlinda asked innocently.“We are just outside of Tsort,” Thorrin said, stepping out of Refuge, and pointing at the wall.“AAAAAAAAAARGH!” Inga growled, jumping down to walk alongside the elephants.“What’s she so tshort about?” Thorrin asked, equally innocently. Then ducked as Inga lobbed a rock past his head. The Wall of Tsort was a formidable barrier between Tsort and their traditional enemy, Ephebe.[3]Most of the wall wasn’t patrolled. It seemed redundant, at least in this part, except in times of heightened tensions (or tshortened tempers).. No one wanted to spend the time or effort to get an entire army across the wastes unless they’d budgeted for a whole war. “We need a gate,” Thorrin said. He looked Hubwards and Rimwards. “Any guesses?”“Does it matter?” Earlinda asked. “We’re not in a critical race against time or water supplies.”“No,” Inga said, “but Refuge IS getting Tsunburnt.” The other two spun around, worry on their faces, to inspect the little shelter. Which sat there, looking the same as it always had, of course. Then they realized what she’d said and turned to glare. “What? Are you going to be poor tsports about this?” They continued to glare. “Took me HOURS to think that one up.”She slumped at the back of the platform, legs hanging over Tharl’s back. “REFUGE thought it was funny.”“Inga,” Thorrin said in a lecturing tone, “a friend’s health is not the tsort of thing to joke about.”“Yeah,” Earlinda agreed. “We try to be tsupportive."They turned back to discussing directions before they broke out in giggles. Inga joined them and they turned right. “Towards the Tseaports on the Tcircle Tsea!”----- Just before noon they reached the Gate, and the associated border town, Tsallyport. They couldn’t see any movement on the road up to the gate, the town beyond the gate, or the Wall over the gate.Inga hoped the gate guardians were well-rested. The Ankh-Morporkians looked at the stillness and worried the guards would resent having to work because some strangers turned up, as they would have been at home.There were only two guards visible when they rode up. They were sitting comfortably in a shaded spot just beyond the portcullis. A barracks just past the gate had a rack of spears and pikes that indicated more men could be summoned quickly.They looked at the elephants with mild interest. They did not come out of the shade. The trio climbed down to lean a bit out of the sun and talk.“Who are you?” a guard asked.“We’re merchants,” Thorrin said. “Where you guys from?” one asked. “Ankh-Morpork,” Thorrin replied automatically. Earlinda shook her head, an entire background wasted. She must to teach this man subterfuge if she had to nail it into his skull. “Get out,” the guard said. “They got elephants in Ankh-Morpork?”“They have EVERYTHING in Ankh-Morpork,” Earlinda said. “For the right price.”“I have heard that,” the second guard said. “So where are you going with these Ankh-Morpork elephants?”“Howandaland,” Earlinda replied. “Why are you taking elephants TO Howandaland guard number one asked. “They have hundreds!”“Thousands,” the other guard corrected.“I don’t know about that. I hear tell they’ve suffered a pachyderm population depression following M’Bu’s Folly.”“That’s true.”“Who’s M’Bu?” Inga asked.“Crazy guy, rounded up a thousand elephants and took ‘em off to some foreign place.”“Why?”“Why else? To sell ‘em.”“Do you know where he took them?” Thorrin asked.“Well, that’d be Ankh-“ And that’s when the penny dropped. “You’ve got THOSE elephants? Heck, the betting was on the herd dying on the way there!”“Dying?” Thorrin asked innocently. The other two looked as innocent as they possibly could. “No, they’re perfectly fine.”“Ain’t that a kick in the head!” the other guard said. They all laughed about that. Then the guards looked serious. “Okay,” the first one said, “That’s the most fascinating thing to happen in or through the Tsallyport in my whole enlistment. We’re supposed to inspect you, your goods, your howdah, but…”“It’s hot,” the second said. “Now, we are rational men. And this IS Tsort, home of logical analysis. If you can come up with a logical puzzle we haven’t heard of-““That CAN be solved,” the first added.“Well, that goes without saying,” the second said. “If it can’t be solved it’s not a logical puzzle.”“Depends on your definition of puzzle. Some things are unsolvable, but very puzzling.”“I’m going to refute your mug with a brick.”“Ahem!” Inga said, waving her hand. “A train leaves Bonk, traveling at 35 miles per hour. At the same time, a train leaves Ankh-Morpork on the same track, moving at 40 miles per hour-““What’s a train?” the first guard asked.“What’s a Beyunk?” the second asked.“What’s a mile?”“What’s a track?”Ten minutes later, they had blown the alert whistle and turned out the whole garrison. All twenty men stood outside the gate, watching Inga draw her problem on the Wall’s Ephebe side, just Hubwards of Gate Tsallyport.Earlinda was compiling a glossary on the Rimwards side of the gate. Thorrin got some paper from Snarl’s load and offered it to people trying to write calculations in the fine sand beside the road.----- Mother Hogany waved her hand and the wagons stopped. She gazed up at the towering Mountains of the Sun, the range across the Hub end of Howandaland. The upper half was so high that it was permanently covered in snow. “We wait here,” she said.“Here?” Number Three asked.“Here. This will be best.” She gestured for them to set up camp. The rest of the coven staked out the tents, while her husbands unloaded the wagons.“Are they coming through the mountains…here?” Number One asked. “Is there a secret pass?”“They’re coming over the mountains. Here. Without a pass.” She sounded confident. Of course, as a witch, she always made sure to sound confident.Number Two was still not sure. “How can you be so sure? You said the wizard’s future was hidden.”“It is,” she told him. Then she pat him on the head. “But mine is not.”“What about the yetis?” Two persisted.“Their future is also clear,” Mother smiled. “Just short. Now, hurry, I wish to be in bed in an hour.”“Mother, it’s only just past noon.”“I did not say I wished to sleep in an hour,” she pointed out. Two was her biggest husband, but also the dumbest one. ----- A benefit of traveling through Tsort was that they got a chance to worship. Some Tsorteans claimed their land to be the source of religion and there was at least one temple to every religious tradition they’d ever heard about somewhere in the country.Thorrin found several temples to Libertina. He bought a formal sacrifice from the temple and was pretty sure he felt the blasting wind of her regard from the altar. He tipped heavily for the efforts of the guys on the bellows below the nave.Inga managed to find one temple that offered to act as intercessor to any gods or goddesses that did their divine thing from snow-covered peaks. She prayed to Urika and really thought she felt a chill. Earlinda tried one of the many temples to Anoia and may have received a vision. She thought she heard someone in the distance screaming what sounded like ‘What?’ and ‘We have a bad connection!’ “What connection?” she muttered for days after. “Physical? Spiritual? WHAT!?!”….. Mistress X of Borogravia External Intelligence sat at her desk doing paperwork. These days, there was always paperwork. How long had it been since she’d been in the field? Good Seth, had it been two husbands ago?One of her junior analysts entered the room. She had an open-door policy. There were no doors inside the entire building. Never could be sure who might be hiding behind one. For a similar reason, all the desks were trestle tables.“I might have found a lead on our wizard,” D stated.“Really?” She didn’t get her hopes up. She went through this eight times a week. “Tell me more.”“Apparently there’s a group from Ankh-Morpork crossing Tsort, could be headed towards Howandaland.”“So far so good,” X commented. She waited for the disappointment.“A couple and their servant,” D continued. They were noted because they’re paying their custom fees, bridge tolls, and road tax with story problems.”“They solve them?”“They hand them out. Then stay until everyone knows how to solve them. You know what Tsortean are like with puzzles. But it’s weird, right?”“Very weird,” she had to agree. She had known this would happen a lot when she tasked the field agents with reporting anything ‘out of the ordinary.' But she’d hoped for better filtering in the outer office.“Worth scrutiny, anyway,” X allowed. “See if anyone can pick up their trail and get a closer look.”“That’ll be easy, they’ll just follow the elephants.”For the first time, X put down the report she was scanning. She clasped her hands together on her desk. “I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.”“Elenhants. Five of them. They’ve got a regular caravan headed to the Temple, looks like,” D explained.X nodded, then smiled. “Okay, for your in-rating professional development as an analyst, I want you to work on your reporting. This was like pulling teeth.” And how long had it been since she’d had that opportunity, either!“So go out in the hallway, compose yourself, and summarize everything you’ve told me into a concise expository lump.”“Yes, Mistress, thank you.” He stepped out. She went back to her reading, but kept an ear out. Eventually she heard what she’d been waiting for, the slap of a hand against a forehead. And a sad, slow groan. “COME!” she commanded.D slunk back into her office. She looked up and raised an eyebrow. “Yes, ma’am. It has come to my attention that the richest man alive ran off to join a math circus, and is sneaking through the most militarized nation on the continent, making sure to draw the attention, and fix himself in the memory, of every official in the country.”“And your recommendation?”“That I go back to work and stop wasting your time.”“That’s the benefit of a good summary,” she said with a smile. “The quicker you deliver it, the less of my time you use. And very likely, when you practice it, you won’t waste ANY of my time.” She smiled again to show she wasn’t mad, then waved him away.“Elephants,” she muttered as she went back to her reports.----- Tsort had occasional tiffs with Klatch, but not enough to justify extending the Great Wall around to that side of the country. Tharl passed the last customs shack and descended to the wadi that acted as a semi-official border between the two nations.“What’s a wadi?” Inga asked.“It’s a riverbed that is only sometimes under a river,” Thorrin explained. He let Tharl get close to the bottom of the border. “Think of it as a very shallow valley, or a very wide ditch.”A small, slow stream coursed along the bottom of the wadi. “This one is named Wadi Eugh-No,” Earlinda said. “This side is Tsort, that side is Klatch.”“OH! We know people in Klatch!”“None of whom would welcome us involving them,” Thorrin said. He turned the caravan rimwards, following the path of the water. “This goes to Howandaland?” Inga asked.“The headwaters of this river are just below the Mountains of the Sun,” he explained. “This water used to be part of a glacier, more than likely.” “And where are we going through the Mountains?” Earlinda asked, glancing at the map. There were no roads anywhere near the river, but that wasn’t definitive. On the Disc, cartography was still largely a participatory discipline, and sometimes researchers didn’t make it back to the publisher.“I was planning to just power up them,” Thorrin said confidently. Inga and Earlinda both groaned. “What? It’s not arrogance, it’s an established technique! That’s how we got out of the ravine the day you and I met!”“I doubt Jarl’s caboosenbumpen will be anywhere near as enticing,” Inga said.----- It took them two days to reach the Mountains of the Sun. Thorrin halted Tharl and pointed. “History repeats itself.”The other two looked up and down the mountain before them. “This is history?” Earlinda asked.“Bobsleds! When they brough the elephants to Dibbler, M'Bu's Folly, they came down these mountains on wooden sleds. Basically two-elephant bobsleds. See the runs?” He sighed happily.Earlinda could only see very jagged rocks covered with very jagged ice. Looked like dangerous danger with danger sprinkled over the top. She began thinking about spending this part of the trip inside Refuge, hiding under a bed.Inga, a mountain girl from way back, quickly noted the deep gouges made in the side of the mountain before them. They skewed left and right, a bit, at the very top, but then the lines became straight like a bowling alley. Once ten or twelve tons of elephant got up to speed, there wasn’t a lot that was going to stop them. Or turn them. Or slow them down.Even after the ice ended, the grooves continued. But they weren’t worn into the rock as much as violently pounded through the rock. So the grooves were just as jagged as the rocks around them.“How did they teach the elephants to bobsled?” she asked. Thorrin shrugged. “Probably the same way Vikings learn the way to Fallhalla.”The intermittent river of Wadi Eugh-No didn’t have headwaters as much as treadwaters. Meltwater coursed down the agitated slopes of this side of the Mountains of God range, hanging out at the foothills like disappointed teens hoping for a dance or a riot. When enough water got bored there, it started to slouch over to the Wadi, then wander down through Al-Khali, and on to the Circle Sea.They camped for the night at the side of an almost watered lake. Thorrin joked about raising the dead river from the bed with his necromancy.The others just looked around at the silent, brooding foothills and shivered.Early the next morning, Inga volunteered to scout a path and set off, riding Varl and singing a hiking hymn to Urika.They let her get a ways a head and followed. They were about half a mile up the slope when it became too steep to stay on the driving bench. Thorrin moved to Jarl, Earlinda rode Carl.This went a bit easier. And like Inga’s first act as a zombie, they elephants just pounded their way up. They kicked footholds into the rock, then into the ice. The stomping feet woke up two yeti up above them on the ice. Or in the ice, really. Yeti are ambush predators, hiding in snowbanks or ice fields until their prey comes close. They’re a form of troll, well adapted to the altitude of year-round glaciers. Living rock beings that can’t actually benefit from eating flesh, but they never let that stop them.These two watched the strange creatures approach. The last trolls to claim this area had done the exact same thing. Except in their case, the elephants were screaming down the mountain, not climbing up it. And no matter what you’re made of, taking seventeen hundred stone of elephant to the face isn’t good for your face. Or anything attached to it.These yetis had just found an empty part of the range, unclaimed and unguarded. They’d enjoyed a profitable few years on the slope, and never really wondered why no one had been hunting there until they showed up.Today, the elephants approached at just above a decent walking rate. They didn’t even give the yetis pause.[4] They readied themselves for the first one, way out ahead of the rest.Inga wasn’t sure why, but she didn’t like the path she was on. The groove she’d been following seemed to be partially filled in.She considered the rest of the slope, then turned Varl around. The yetis could not resist the combined advantage of surprise and an attack from the rear, and leapt up out of their hiding snow.Thorrin wasn’t a troll expert, but part of the basic education of wizards is recognizing hazards in the wild. They learn how to best deal with trolls on day two.[5] Troll life is based on silicon. They’re rather like large, uncooperative computers. The colder their brains get, the easier their thoughts travel. The warmer they get, the less efficiently their nerves work.Thorrin saw the creatures erupt into view, identified them as trolls, and cast a heat spell. He barely stopped himself from throwing a fireball, as Inga was in the way.He just heated up the immediate area of the two trolls. With necrothaum in his panic. That meant ‘immediate area’ extended one glacier in any direction. And the results were instant.One second he was riding an elephant almost straight up into the air; the next he was swimming through a waterfall, diving down the side of the mountain.The water surged back and forth, he flailed arms and legs, and wondered if he knew a good spell that could be cast while drowning.Then someone grabbed his arm. He was being rescued. He went instantly limp so as not to interfere.Earlinda screamed at him, “You have to HELP! Jackass! Grab a rock!” He instantly turned, climbing uphill and swimming upstream, and with her help found his way onto an outcropping. He flopped across it, watching the waters continue to froth.“Sorry,” he eventually gasped. “I’m just accustomed to being saved by Inga.”“She saw me moving towards you and went to save Refuge,” Earlinda coughed back.“Ah.” They eventually sat up, looking downhill. Way down at the bottom, one foothill rose above the floodwaters. Inga waved from the top of the hill. All the elephants were there, looking complete. Refuge also looked to be unharmed, though it was hard to be sure from this far away. Inga was obviously waiting for the waters to recede so they could recover all the lost ground.“Sorry,” Earlinda said.“What? What do you have to be sorry about?” Thorrin asked, confused.“That day I caught up with you? Got you dressed as a merchant?” She shook her head. “Wasn’t worried about you being identified. I wanted to get the staff away from you.”“Okay,” Thorrin nodded, still confused.“Every day. Every single day. We got up, we ate, we went outside… And I made sure you didn’t have the staff.“You’re a gods damned disaster with that staff.”“I-“ he protested.“Don’t get me wrong,” she overrode. “You’ve saved my city, my life, my friends. Heck, even my career. But on the most secret mission I’ve EVER been on, you’ve managed to DEVESTATE a mountain range, even without your staff.“And I’m sorry. I should have done something… I don’t know what, but something to at least cap your power.” She slumped in place, a profile of dejection, a trophy of failure.Thorrin reached into his pocket and took out two sticks of chalk. He handed them over to the assessin.“What? A symbolic gesture?”“No,” he sighed. “I’m giving you a cap to my power. You make an excellent argument.” He pointed in the distance where the waters were flowing. They were high enough to make out the grooves the bobsleds had bored to the sort-of lake all those years ago. They gave the water channels, and an interesting visual effect.“Plus, the word ‘disaster’ is not out of place.”“You can’t cast magic with chalk, even I know that,” she pointed out.“I can,” he said. “That’s what I used for…” He gestured around them to encompass the slopes and the rapidly draining lake.Eyes wide in surprise, Earlinda pocketed the sticks. “Thank you, Thorrin. A little late, maybe, but thank you.” They sat in silence, waiting for their baths to climb up to them.----- The Lesser Vizier of Hersheba was startled when his Chief Cook[6] climbed in through the window. “Just once, the door! I beg you!”“Sorry, just got news.”“The hallway is on fire?”“What? No, we may have a clue. About the powerful wizard everyone’s looking for!”“What’s the clue?” LVoH asked.“Someone melted half the mountain range in Hubwards Howandaland.""Which half?""The half towards," and he made the gesture of cursing towards the hated enemy nation of Klatch.“Then it’s not the wizard,” Lesser said. “But such a powerful magic!” CC protested.“It’s probably just that…” He searched his large and colorful vocabulary for the worst possible insult. “Woman over in,” gesture of cursing towards Klatch and the Seriph who leads it. “She’s probably trying to irrigate her widdershins lands in the off season.”“We’ve heard nothing through our networks,” CC insisted.“Then get back over there and find out why we haven’t!” LV snapped. CC ducked his head and dove through the window, on his way to the hated gesture country. [1] Ridcully knew exactly who he was asking about, but didn’t want anyone thinking he’d been impressed by the stunt with the Sphinx. [2] Possibly excepting the Librarian. But Ridcully ever really tried to pry, so he was never told to toddle on. [3] It was built on the border between Tsort and Djelibeybi, but it faced Ephebe in that direction, too, over beyond Djelibeybi, and you just can’t be too careful. [4] Not that yetis are known for their evaluation of consequences. [5] Day one is about price-gouging eateries along the road. [6] The founders of Hersheba’s intelligence network felt that giving their chief spy the title, Chief Spy, would give too much information away. The fact that all the royal cooks are trained Assassins, enter and exit rooms by window, travel on rooftop, and speak fourteen language is never seen as equally obvious.