‘It works! It works!’ shouted Professor Oppenhauser, rushing into the dean’s office. ‘It works, gentlemen! Finally! Finally! It functions. It rotates. It works! It works!’

‘Really?’ Jean La Voisier, Professor of Chemistry, called Rotten Eggs by his students, asked bluntly and quite sceptically. ‘It can’t be! And what, out of interest, works?’

‘My perpetual motion machine!’

‘A perpetum mobile?’ Edmund Bumbler, venerable Zoology lecturer, asked curiously. ‘Indeed? You aren’t exaggerating, my dear colleague?’

‘Not in the slightest!’ yelled Oppenhauser, and leaped like a goat. ‘Not a bit! It works! The machine works. I set it in motion and it works. It runs continuously. Without stopping. Permanently. Forever and ever. It can’t be described, colleagues, you must see it! Come to my lab, quickly!’

‘I’m having my breakfast,’ protested Rotten Eggs, but his protest was lost in the hubbub and general excited commotion. Professors, magisters and bachelors threw coats and fur coats over their gowns and ran for the exit, led by Oppenhauser, still shouting and gesticulating. Rotten Eggs pointed his digitus infamis at them and returned to his roll and forcemeat.

The small group of scholars, constantly being joined by more scholars greedy to see the fruits of Oppenhauser’s thirty years of labours, briskly covered the distance separating them from the laboratory of the famous physicist. They were just about to open the door when the ground suddenly shook. Perceptibly. Powerfully, actually. Very powerfully, actually.

It was a seismic wave, one of the series of earthquakes caused by the destruction of Stygga Castle, Vilgefortz’s hide-out, by the sorceresses. The seismic wave had come all the way to Oxenfurt from distant Ebbing.

Dozens of pieces of glass exploded with a crash from the stained-glass window on the frontage of the Department of Fine Arts. The bust of Nicodemus de Boot, the academy’s first rector, scrawled over with rude words, fell from its plinth. The cup of herb tea with which Rotten Eggs was washing down his roll and forcemeat fell from the table. A first-year physics student, Albert Solpietra, fell from a plantain tree in the academy grounds that he had climbed to impress some female medical students.

And Professor Oppenhauser’s perpetum mobile, his legendary perpetual motion engine, turned over once more and stopped. Forever.

And it was never possible to start it again.

‘Long live the dwarves! Long live Mahakam!’

What kind of mixed bunch is this, what gang of ruffians? thought Hierarch Hemmelfart, blessing the parade with a trembling hand. Who’s being cheered here? Venal condottieri, obscene dwarves; what a bizarre bunch! Who won this war, after all, them or us? By the Gods, I must draw the kings’ attention to this. When historians and writers get down to their work, their scribblings ought to be censored. Mercenaries, witchers, hired brigands, non-humans and all other suspicious elements are to vanish from the chronicles of humanity. Are to be deleted, expunged. Not a word about them. Not a word.