“I've been following the noble profession of hermiting here for nigh on fifty-seven years, practising piety, sobriety, celibacy and the pursuit of true wisdom in the tradition of my father and grandfather and great-grandfather before me.”

“Like sheep which, having been driven to a pasture, can now spread out at their leisure, the clouds began to drift. Afternoon sunlight sliced through into the still waters. The boomerang hung in the sky, and the boy thought he would have to find a new word for the way the colours glowed. In the meantime, he looked down at the water and tried out the word he'd been taught by his grandfather, who'd been taught it by his grandfather, and which had been kept for thousands of years for when it would been needed. It meant the smell after rain. It had, he thought, been well worth waiting for.”

“They were indeed what was known as 'old money', which meant that it had been made so long ago that the black deeds which had originally filled the coffers were now historically irrelevant. Funny, that: a brigand for a father was something you kept quiet about, but a slave-taking pirate for a great-great-great-grandfather was something to boast of over the port. Time turned the evil bastards into rogues, and rogue was a word with a twinkle in its eye and nothing to be ashamed of.”

“Probably the last man who knew how it worked had been tortured to death years before. Or as soon as it was installed. Killing the creator was a traditional method of patent protection.”

“He knew from experience that true and obvious ideas, such as the ineffable wisdom and judgment of the Great God Om, seemed so obscure to many people that you actually had to kill them before they saw the error of their ways...”

“In the words of the philosopher Sceptum, the founder of my profession: am I going to get paid for this?”

“Many an ancient lord's last words had been, "You can't kill me because I've got magic aaargh.”