Pyramids: A Discworld Novel: 7

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At a British public school/grammar school sports day, the pupil who overall won the most, was declared ‘Victor Lu Teppic's examination is heavily modelled on the British Driving test although anyone who has taken an oral seafarers exam for Masters and Mates or has had to defend a post-graduate dissertation or thesis will also recognize similarities to the assassins test.

Pyramids - Sir Terry Pratchett

Page 34 (Penguin Edition) – ‘one of the boys from further along the coast, shyly tried to put the boy in the next bed inside a wickerwork cage he had made in Craft and set fire to him’ is a reference to the alleged practice in the old Celtic/Druidic religion of placing victims inside a giant wicker cage shaped like a man and setting them on fire. Pratchett has great fun riffing on this tendency, whilst also employing it himself, with the novel featuring some clever ideas on time running at different speeds and time warps stripping people of some of their dimensions. A Wizard Did It: The Discworld equivalent of A Wizard Did It - If you can't explain/understand something, it was probably quantum. Oh, and there's even a hairy sidekick who can't talk English but is vastly more intelligent than anyone expects.

Bait-and-Switch: Teppic's father tells an ancestor, recently freed from his pyramid, that he hates pyramids.

Pyramids by Terry Pratchett | Waterstones Pyramids by Terry Pratchett | Waterstones

In the ending, it's implied that was actually the case, and the pirates afterwards made the mistake of trying to rob Chidder. Tragic Time Traveler: High Priest Dios is a Downplayed example, as he doesn't actually know he's in a time loop, but he's still stuck in a time loop for thousands of years until the end of the book, where he gets sent back to the begining of the kingdom. Teppic is an Assassin who doesn't kill people (apart from inhuming the pyramid and the gods at the end; he doesn't kill people that are "alive" in the conventional sense. Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland so cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship in this world or the next. True Listeners have always been revered among oral cultures, and prized for their rarity value; bards and poets are ten a cow, but a good Listener is hard to find, or at least hard to find twice.

But when Teppic's father dies suddenly, fate takes him away from assassination to something far more unsavoury: politics. Discover the joy of reading with us, your trusted source for affordable books that do not compromise on quality. In a land where a similar time is reused day by day, it comes as something of an unexpected when the pharaoh Teppicymon XXVII chooses to send his child Teppic outside of the kingdom to get his training.