Terry Pratchett. Moving pictures
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...'re in the hill, aren't we?' said Ginger's voice in the darkness.'Yes.'
'How did we get here?'
'I followed you.'
'I told you to stop me.'
'Yes, but then you tied me up.'
'I did no such thing!'
'You tied me up,' repeated Victor. 'And then you came here and opened
the door and made a torch of some sort and went all the way into that that
place. I dread to think of what you'd have done if I hadn't woken you up.'
There was a pause.
'I really did all that?' said Ginger uncertainly.
'You really did.'
'But I don't remember any of it!'
'I believe you. But you still did it.'
'What what was that place, anyway?'
Victor shifted in the darkness, trying to make himself comfortable.
'I don't know,' he confessed. 'At first I thought it was a temple. And
it looked as though people used it for watching moving pictures.'
'But it looked hundreds of years old!'
'Thousands, I expect.'
'But look, that can't be right,' said Ginger, in the small voice of one
trying to be reasonable while madness is breaking down the door with a
cleaver. 'The alchemists only got the idea a few months ago.'
'Yes. It's something to think about.'
He reached out and found her. Her body was ramrod stiff and flinched at
his touch.
'We're safe enough here,' he added. 'Gaspode will soon bring back some
help.
Don't you worry about that.'
He tried not to think about the sea slapping at the stairs, and the
manylegged things that scuttled over the midnight floor. He tried to put out
of his mind the thought of octopi slithering silently over the seats in
front of that living, shifting screen. He tried to forget the patrons who
had been sitting in the darkness while, above them, centuries passed.
Perhaps they were waiting for the lady to come around with the banged grains
and hot sausages.
The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it's
as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started,
and noone will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself
from the clues.
And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second
house.
Candlelight flickered in the University corridor.
The Bursar did not think of himself as a brave man. The most he felt
happy about tackling was a column of numbers, and being good at numbers had
taken him further up the hierarchy of Unseen University than magic had ever
done. But he couldn't let this pass .
... whumm ... whumm ... whummwhummwhummWHUMM WHUMM.
He crouched behind a pillar and counted eleven pellets.
Little jets of sand puffed out of the bags. They were coming at
two-minute intervals now.
He ran to the heap of sandbags and tugged at them.
Reality wasn't the same everywhere. Well, of course, every wizard knew
that.
Reality wasn't very thick anywhere on the Discworld. In some places it
was very thin indeed. That was why magic worked. What Riktor thought he
could measure was changes in reality, places where the real was rapidly
becoming unreal. And every wizard knew what could happen if things became
unreal enough to form a hole.
But, he thought, as he clawed at the bags, you'd need massive amounts
of magic.
We'd be bound to spot that amount of magic. It'd stand out like ...
well, like a lot of magic.
I must have taken at least fifty seconds so far.
He peered at the vase in its bunker.
Oh.
He'd been hoping he might be wrong.
All the pellets had been expelled in one direction. Half a dozen
sandbags had been shot full of holes. And Numbers had thought that a couple
of pellets in a month indicated a dangerous buildup of unreality ...
The Bursar mentally drew a line from the vase, through the damaged
sandbags, to the far end of the corridor .
... whumm ... whumm ...
He jerked back, and then realized that there was no need to worry. All
the pellets were being shot out of the ornamental elephant's head opposite
him. He relaxed.
... whumm ... whumm ...
The vase rocked violently as mysterious machinery swung around inside
it. The Bursar put his head closer to it. Yes, there was definitely a
hissing sound, like air being squeezed
Eleven pellets slammed at high speed into the sandbags.
The vase recoiled back, in accordance with the famous principle of
reaction.
Instead of hitting a sandbag, it hit the Bursar.
Mingngng.
He blinked. He took a step backwards. He fell over.
Because Holy Wood's disturbances in reality were extending weak but
opportunist tendrils even as far as Ankh--Morpork, a couple of little
bluebirds flew around his head for a moment and went 'tweettweettweet'
before vanishing.
Gaspode lay on the sand and wheezed. Laddie danced around him, barking
urgently.
'We're well out of that,' he managed, and stood up and shook himself.
Laddie barked and looked incredibly photogenic.
'All right, all right,' sighed Gaspode. 'How about if we go and find
some breakfast and maybe catch up on our sleep and then we'll'
Laddie barked again.
Gaspode sighed.
'Oh, all right,' he said. 'Have it your way. But you won't get any
thanks, you know.'
The dog whizzed away across the sand. Gaspode followed at a more
leisurely, ambling pace, and was very surprised when Laddie doubled back,
picked him up gently by the scruff of the neck, and bounded off again.
'You're only doin' this to me 'cos I'm small,' Gaspode complained, as
he swung from side to side, and 'No, not that way! Humans'll be no good at
this time o' the morning. We want trolls. They'll still be up and about and
they're dab hands at the underground stuff. Take the next right. We want the
Blue Lias and oh, bugger.'
It had suddenly dawned on him that he was going to be required to talk.
And in public.
You could spend ages carefully concealing your vocal abilities from
people and then, bingo, you were on the spot and you had to talk. Otherwise
young Victor and Cat Woman would be moulderin' down there forever. Young
Laddie was going to drop him in front of someone and look expectant and he'd
have to explain. And afterwards spend his whole life as some sort of freak.
Laddie trotted up the street and into the smoky portals of the Blue
Lias, which was crowded. He threaded his way through a maze of treetrunk
legs to the bar, barked sharply, and dropped Gaspode on the floor.
He looked expectant.
The buzz of conversation stopped.
'Is that Laddie?' said a troll. 'What he want?'
Gaspode wandered groggily to the nearest troll and tugged politely at a
trailing strip of rusty chain mail.
' 'Scuse me,' he said.
'He bloody intelligent dog,' said another troll, idly kicking Gaspode
aside. 'I see him in click yesterday. He can play dead and count up to
five.'
'That two more than you can, then.' This got a round of laughter.[23]
'No, shut up. I reckon', said the first troll, 'he trying to tell us
something.'
''scuse me'
'You only got to look at the way he leaping about and barking.'
'That right. I saw him in this click, he showing people where to find
lost children in caves.'
''scuse me'
A troll brow wrinkled. 'To eat 'em, you mean?'
'No, to bring 'em outside.'
'What, like for a barbecue sort of thing?'
''scuse me'
Another foot caught Gaspode on the side of his bullet head.
'Could be he found some more. Look at the way he running back and
forwards to the door. He one clever dog.'
'We could go look,' said the first troll.
'Good idea. It seem like ages since I had my tea.'
'Listen, you not allowed to eat people in Holy Wood. It get us bad
name! Also Silicon AntiDefamation League be down on you like a ton of
rectangular building things.'
'Yeah, but could be a reward or something.'
''SCUSE ME'
'Right! Also, big improvement for troll image vizahviz public relations
if we find lost children.'
'And even if we don't, we can eat the dog, right?'
The bar emptied, leaving only the usual clouds of smoke, cauldrons of
molten troll drinks, Ruby idly scraping the congealed lava off the mugs, and
a small, weary, motheaten dog.
The small, weary, motheaten dog thought hard about the difference
between looking and acting like a wonder dog and merely being one.
It said 'Bugger.'
Victor remembered being frightened of tigers when he was young. In vain
did people point out that the nearest tiger was three thousand miles away.
He'd say,
'Is there any sea between where they live and here?' and people would
say,
'Well, no, but' and he'd say, 'Then it's just a matter of distance.'
Darkness was the same thing. All dreadful dark places were connected by
the nature of darkness itself. Darkness was everywhere, all the time, just
waiting for the lights to go out. Just like the Dungeon Dimensions, really.
Just waiting for reality to snap.
He held on tight to Ginger.
'You needn't,' she said. 'I've got a grip on myself now.'
'Oh, good,' he said weakly.
'The trouble is, so have you.'
He relaxed.
'Are you cold?' she said.
'A bit. It's very clammy down here.'
'Is it your teeth I can hear chattering?'
'Who else's? No,' he added hurriedly, 'don't even think about it.'
'You know,' she said, after a while, 'I don't remember anything about
tying you up. I'm not even very good at knots.'
'These were pretty good,' said Victor.
'I just remember the dream. There was this voice telling me that I must
wake the the sleeping man?'
Victor thought of the armoured figure on the slab.
'Did you get a good look at it?' he said. 'What was it like?'
'I don't know about tonight,' said Ginger cautiously. 'But in my dreams
it's always looked a bit like my Uncle Oswald.'
Victor thought of a sword taller than he was. You couldn't parry a
slash from something like that, it'd cut through anything. Somehow it was
hard to think of anything looking like an Oswald with a sword like that.
'Why's he remind you of your Uncle Oswald?' he said.
'Because my Uncle Oswald lay quite still like that. Mind you, I only
ever saw him once. And that was at his funeral.'
Victor opened his mouth and there were distant, blurred voices. A few
stones moved. A voice, a little closer now, trilled, 'Hallo, little
children. This way, little children.'
'That's Rock!' said Ginger.
'I'd know that voice anywhere,' said Victor. 'Hey! Rock! It's me!
Victor!'
There was a worried pause. Then Rock's voice bellowed: 'It's my friend
Victor!'
'That mean we can't eat him?'
'Noone is to eat my friend Victor! We dig him out with speed!'
There was the sound of crunching. Then another troll's voice
complained, 'They call this limestone? I call it tasteless.'
There was some more scrabbling. A third voice said, 'Don't see why we
can't eat him. Who'd know?'
'You uncivilized troll,' scolded Rock. 'What you thinking of? You eat
people, everyone laugh at you, say, "He very defective troll, do not know
how to behave in polite society" and stop paying you three dollar a day and
send you back to mountains.'
Victor gave what he hoped would sound like a light chuckle.
'They're a lot of laughs, aren't they?' he said.
'Heaps,' said Ginger.
'Of course, all that stuff about eating people is just bravado. They
hardly ever do it. You shouldn't worry about it.'
'I'm not. I'm worried because I walk around all the time when I'm
asleep and I don't know why. You make it sound as if I was going to wake up
that sleeping creature. It's a horrible thought. Something's inside my
head.'
There was a crash as more rocks were pulled aside.
'That's the odd thing,' said Victor. 'When people are, er, possessed,
the, er, possessing thing doesn't usually care much about them or anyone
else. I mean, it wouldn't have just tied me up. It would have hit me over
the head with something.'
He reached for her hand in the dark.
'That thing on the slab,' he said.
'What about it?'
'I've seen it before. It's in the book I found. There's dozens of
pictures of it, and they must have thought it was very important to keep it
behind the gate.
That's what the pictograms say, I think. Gate ... man. The man behind
the gate. The prisoner. You see, I'm sure the reason why all the priests or
whoever they were had to go and chant there every day was'
A slab by his head was pulled aside and weak daylight poured through.
It was very closely followed by Laddie, who tried to lick Victor's face and
bark at the same time.
'Yes, yes! Well done, Laddie,' said Victor, trying to fight him off.
'Good dog. Good boy, Laddie.'
'Good boy Laddie! Good boy Laddie!'
The bark brought several small shards of stone down from the ceiling.
'Aha!' said Rock. Several other troll heads appeared behind him as
Victor and Ginger stared out of the hole.
'They not little children,' muttered the one who had been complaining
about the eating ban. 'They look stringy.'
'I tell you before,' said Rock menacingly, 'no eating people. It cause
no end of trouble.'
'Why not just one leg? Then everyone'll be'
Rock picked up a halfton slab in one hand, weighed it thoughtfully, and
then hit the other troll so hard with it that it broke.
'I tell you before,' he told the recumbent figure, 'it trolls like you
getting us a bad name. How can we take rightful place in brotherhood of
sapient species with defective trolls like you letting side down alter
time?'
He reached through the hole and pulled Victor out bodily.
'Thanks, Rock. Er. There's Ginger in there, too.'
Rock gave him a crafty nudge that bruised a couple of ribs.
'So I see,' he said. 'And she wearing very pretty silk neggleliggle.
You find nice place to indulge in bit of "What is the health of your
parent?" and the Disc move for you, yeah?' The other trolls grinned.
'Uh, yes, I suppose-' Victor began.
'That's not true at all!' snapped Ginger, as she was helped through the
hole.
'We weren't'
'Yes, it is!' said Victor, making furious signals with his hands and
eyebrows.
'It's absolutely true! You're absolutely right, Rock!'
'Yeah,' said one of the trolls behind Rock. 'I seen them on the clicks.
He kissing her and carrying her off the whole time.'
'Now listen,' Ginger began.
'And now we get out of here fast,' said Rock. 'This whole ceiling
looking very defective to me. Could go at any time.'
Victor glanced up. Several of the blocks were dipping ominously.
'You're right,' he said. He grabbed the arm of the protesting Ginger
and hustled her along the passage. The trolls gathered up the fallen
compatriot who did not know how to behave in polite company and plodded
after them.
'That was disgusting, giving them the impression that' Ginger hissed.
'Shut up!' snapped Victor. 'What did you want me to say, hmm? I mean,
what sort of explanation do you think would fit? What would you like people
to know?'
She hesitated.
'Well, all right,' she conceded. 'But you could have thought of
something else. You could have said we were exploring, or looking for, for
fossils' her voice trailed off.
'Yes, in the middle of the night with you in a silk neggleliggle,' said
Victor.
'What is a neggleliggle, anyway?'
'He meant negligee,' said Ginger.
'Come on, let's get back to town. Afterwards I might just have time to
have a couple of hours' sleep.'
'What do you mean, afterwards?'
'We're going to have to buy these lads a big drink'
There was a low rumble from the hill. A cloud of dust billowed out of
the doorway and covered the trolls. The rest of the roof had gone.
'And that's it,' said Victor. 'It's over. Can you make the sleepwalking
part of you understand that? It's no good trying to get in any more, there
isn't any way. It's buried. It's over. Thank goodness.'
There's a bar like it in every town. It's dimlylit and the drinkers,
although they talk, don't address their words to one another and they don't
listen, either. They just talk the hurt inside. It's a bar for the derelict
and the unlucky and all of those people who have been temporarily flagged
off the racetrack of life and into the pits.
It always does a brisk trade.
On this dawn the mourners sat ranged along the counter, each in his
cloud of gloom, each certain that he was the most unfortunate individual in
the Whole world.
'I created it,' said Silverfish, morosely. 'I thought it would be
educational. It could broaden people's horizons. I didn't intend for it to
be a, a, a show. With a thousand elephants!' he added nastily.
'Yeah,' said Detritus. 'She don't know what she wants. I do what she
want, then she say, that not right, you a troll with no finer feelin', you
do not understand what a girl wants. She say, Girl want sticky things to eat
in box with bow around, I make box with bow around, she open box, she
scream, she say flayed horse not what she mean. She don't know what she
wants.'
'Yeah,' said a voice from under Silverfish's stool. 'It'd serve 'em all
right if I went off an' joined the wolves.'
'I mean, take this Blown Away thing,' said Silverfish. 'It's not even
real. It's not like things really were. It's just lies. Anyone can tell
lies.'
'Yeah,' said Detritus. 'Like, she say, Girl want music under window, I
play music under window, everyone in street wake up and shouting out of
house, You bad troll, what you hitting rocks this time of night? And she
never even wake up.'
'Yeah,' said Silverfish.
'Yeah,' said Detritus.
'Yeah,' said the voice under the stool.
The man who ran the bar was naturally cheerful. It wasn't hard to be
cheerful, really, when your customers acted like lightning rods for any
misery that happened to be floating around. He'd found that it wasn't a good
idea to say things like, 'Never mind, look on the bright side,' because
there never was one, or 'Cheer up, it may never happen,' because often it
already had. All that was expected of him was to keep the drink coming.
He was a little puzzled this morning, though. There seemed to be an
extra person in the bar, quite apart from whoever it was speaking up from
the floor. He kept getting the feeling that he was serving an extra drink,
and even getting paid for it, and even talking to the mysterious purchaser.
But he couldn't see him.
In fact he wasn't quite sure what he was seeing, or who he was talking
to.
He wandered down to the far end of the bar.
A glass slid towards him.
SAME AGAIN, said a voice out of the shadows.
'Er,' said the barman. 'Yeah. Sure. What was it?'
ANYTHING.
The barman filled it with rum. It was pulled away.
The barman sought for something to say. For some reason, he was feeling
terrified.
'Don't see you in here, much,' he managed.
I COME FOR THE ATMOSPHERE. SAME AGAIN.
'Work in Holy Wood, do you?'said the barman, topping up the glass
quickly. It vanished again.
NOT FOR SOME TIME. SAME AGAIN.
The barman hesitated. He was, at heart, a kindly soul. 'You don't think
you've had enough, do you?' he said.
I KNOW EXACTLY WHEN I'VE HAD ENOUGH.
'Everyone says that, though.'
I KNOW WHEN. EVERYONE'S HAD ENOUGH.
There was something very odd about that voice. The barman wasn't quite
sure that he was hearing it with his ears. 'Oh. Well, er,' he said. 'Same
again?'
NO. BUSY DAY TOMORROW. KEEP THE CHANGE.
A handful of coins slid across the counter. They felt icy cold, and
most of them were heavily corroded.
'Oh, er' the barman began.
The door opened and shut, letting in a cold blast of air despite the
warmth of the night.
The barman wiped the top of the bar in a distracted way, carefully
avoiding the coins.
'You see some funny types, running a bar,' he muttered. A voice by his
ear said,
I FORGOT. A PACKET OF NUTS, PLEASE.
Snow glittered on the rimward outriders of the Ramtop mountains, that
great worldspanning range which, where it curves around the Circle Sea,
forms a natural wall between Klatch and the great flat Sto plains.
It was the home of rogue glaciers and prowling avalanches and high,
silent fields of snow.
And yetis. Yetis are a highaltitude species of troll, and quite unaware
that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If
it doesn't, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.
They'd been listening all day to the sounds. Echoes had bounced from
peak to peak along the frozen ranges until, now, it was a steady dull
rumble.
'My cousin', said one of them, idly probing a hollow tooth with a claw,
'said they was enormous grey animals. Elephants.'
'Bigger'n us?' said the other yeti.
'Nearly as bigger'n us,' said the first yeti. 'Loads of them, he said.
More than he could count.'
The second yeti sniffed the wind and appeared to consider this.
'Yeah, well,' he said, gloomily. 'Your cousin can't count above one.'
'He said there was lots of big ones. Big fat grey elephants, all
climbing, all roped together. Big and slow. All carrying lots of oograah.'
Ah.
The first yeti indicated the vast sloping snowfield.
'Good and deep today,' he said. 'Nothing's gonna move fast in this,
right? We lie down in the snow, they won't see us till they're right on top
of us, we panic 'em, it's Big Eats time.' He waved his enormous paws in the
air. 'Very heavy, my cousin said. They'll not move fast, you mark my words.'
The other yeti shrugged.
'Let's do it,' he said, against the sound of distant, terrified
trumpeting.
They lay down in the snow, their white hides turning them into two
unsuspicious mounds. It was a technique that had worked time and again, and
had been handed down from yeti to yeti for thousands of years, although it
wasn't going to be handed much further.
They waited.
There was a distant bellowing as the herd approached.
Eventually the first troll said, very slowly, because it had been
working this out for a long time. 'What do you get, right, what do you get
if, you cross . . . a mountain with a elephant?'
It never got an answer.
The yetis had been right.
When five hundred crude twoelephant bobsleighs crested the ridge ten
feet away at sixty miles an hour, their strappedon occupants trumpeting in
panic, they never saw the yetis until they were right on top of them.
Victor got only two hours' sleep but got up feeling remarkably
refreshed and optimistic.
It was all over. Things were going to be a whole lot better now. Ginger
had been quite nice to him last night well, a few hours ago and whatever it
was in the hill had been well and truly buried.
You got that sort of thing sometimes, he thought, as he poured some
water into the cracked basin and had a quick wash. Some wicked old king or
wizard gets buried and their spirit creeps about, trying to put things right
or something.
Wellknown effect. But now there must be a million tons of rock blocking
the tunnel, and I can't see anyone doing any creeping through that.
The unpleasantly alive screen surfaced briefly in his memory, but even
that didn't seem so bad now. It had been dark in there, there had been lots
of moving shadows, he had been wound up like a spring in any case, no wonder
his eyes had played tricks on him. There had been the skeletons, too, but
even they now lacked the power to terrify. Victor had heard of tribal
leaders up on the cold plains who'd be buried with whole armies of mounted
horsemen, so that their souls would live on in the next world. Maybe there
was something like that here, once. Yes, it all seemed much less horrifying
in the cold light of day.
And that's just what it was. Cold light.
The room was full of the kind of light you got when you woke up on a
winter's morning and knew, by the light, that it had snowed. It was a light
without shadows.
He went to the window and looked out on a pale silver glow.
Holy Wood had vanished.
The visions of the night fountained up in his mind again, as the
darkness returns when the light goes out.
Hang on, hang on, he thought, fighting the panic. It's only fog. You're
bound to get fog sometimes, this close to the sea. And it's glowing like
that because the sun's out. There's nothing occult about fog. It's just fine
drops of water floating in the air. That's all it is.
He dragged his clothes on and threw open the door to the passage and
almost tripped over Gaspode, who had been lying full length in front of the
door like the world's most unwashed draught excluder.
The little dog raised himself unsteadily on his front paws, fixed
Victor with a yellow eye and said, 'I jus' want you to know, right, that I
ain't lyin' in front of your door 'cos of any of this
loyaldog-protectin'hismaster nonsense, OK, it's jus' that when I got back
here-'
'Shut up, Gaspode.'
Victor opened the outer door. Fog drifted in. It seemed to have an
exploratory feel to it; it came in as if it had been waiting for just this
opportunity.
'Fog's just fog,' he said aloud. 'Come on. We're going to Ankh--Morpork
today, remember?'
'My head,' said Gaspode, 'my head feels like the bottom of a cat's
basket.'
'You can sleep on the coach. I can sleep on the coach, if it comes to
that.'
He took a few steps into the silvery glow, and was almost immediately
lost.
Buildings loomed vaguely at him in the thick clammy air.
'Gaspode?' he said hesitantly. Fog's just fog, he repeated. But it
feels crowded. It feels like that, if it suddenly went away, I'd see lots of
people watching me. From outside. And that's ridiculous, because I am
outside, so there's nothing outside of outside. And it's flickering.
'I expect you'll be wantin' me to lead the way,' said a smug voice by
his knee.
'It's very quiet, isn't it?' said Victor, trying to sound nonchalant.
'I expect it's the fog muffling everything.'
'O'corse, maybe gharstely creatures have come up out o' the sea and
murthered every mortal soul except us,' said Gaspode conversationally.
'Shut up!'
Something loomed up out of the brightness. As it got closer it got
smaller, and the tentacles and antennae that Victor's imagination had been
furnishing became the moreorless ordinary arms and legs of Soll Dibbler.
'Victor?' he said uncertainly.
Soll's relief was visible. 'Can't see a thing in this stuff,' he said.
'We thought you'd got lost. Come on, it's nearly noon. We're more or less
ready to go.'
'I'm ready.'
'Good.' Fog droplets had condensed on Soll's hair and clothing. 'Er,'
he said.
'Where are we, exactly?'
Victor turned around. His lodgings had been behind him.
'The fog changes everything, doesn't it?' said Soll unhappily. 'Er, do
you think your little dog can find his way to the studio? He seems quite
bright.'
'Growl, growl,' said Gaspode, and sat up and begged in what Victor at
least recognized as a sarcastic way.
'My word,' said Soll. 'It's as if he understands, isn't it?'
Gaspode barked sharply. After a second or two there was a barrage of
excited answering barks.
'Of course, that'll be Laddie,' said Soll. 'What a clever dog!'
Gaspode looked smug.
'Mind you, that's Laddie in a nutshell,' said Soll, as they set off
towards the barking. 'I expect he could teach your dog a few tricks, eh?'
Victor didn't dare look down.
After a few false turns the archway of Century of the Fruitbat passed
overhead like a ghost. There were more people here; the site seemed to be
filling up with lost wanderers who didn't know where else to go.
There was a coach waiting outside Dibbler's office and Dibbler himself
stood beside it, stamping his feet.
'Come on, come on,' he said, 'I've sent Gaffer ahead with the film. Get
in, the pair of you.'
'Can we travel in this?' said Victor.
'What's to go wrong?' said Dibbler. 'There's one road to Ankh-Morpork.
Anyway, we'll probably be well out of this stuff when we leave the coast. I
don't see why everyone's so nervy. Fog's fog.'
'That's what I say,' said Victor, climbing into the coach.
'It's just a mercy we finished Blown Away yesterday,' said Dibbler.
'All this is probably just something seasonal. Nothing to worry about at
all.'
'You said that before,' said Soll. 'You said it at least five times so
far this morning.'
Ginger was hunched on one seat, with Laddie lying underneath it. Victor
slid along until he was next to her.
'Did you get any sleep?' he whispered.
'Just an hour or two, I think,' she said. 'Nothing happened. No dream
or anything.'
Victor relaxed.
'Then it really is over,' he said. 'I wasn't sure.'
'And the fog?' she demanded.
'Sorry?' said Victor guiltily.
'What's causing the fog?'
'Well,' said Victor, 'as I understand it, when cool air passes over
warm ground, water is precipitated out of'
'You know what I mean! It's not like normal fog at all! It - sort of
drifts oddly,' she finished lamely. 'And you can nearly hear voices,' she
added.
'You can't nearly hear voices,' said Victor, in the hope that his own
rational mind would believe him. 'You either hear them or you don't. Listen,
we're both just tired. That's all it is. We've been working hard and, er,
not getting much sleep, so it's understandable that we think we're nearly
hearing and seeing things.'
'Oh, so you're nearly seeing things, are you?' said Ginger
triumphantly. 'And don't you go around using that calm and reasonable tone
of voice on me,' she added. 'I hate it when people go around being calm and
reasonable at me.'
'I hope you two lovebirds aren't having a tiff?'
Victor and Ginger stiffened. Dibbler clambered up into the opposite
seat, and leered encouragingly at them. Soll followed. There was a slam as
the driver shut the carriage door.
'We'll stop for a meal when we're halfway,' said Dibbler,. as they
lurched forward. He hesitated, and then sniffed suspiciously.
'What's that smell?' he said.
'I'm afraid my dog is under your seat,' said Victor.
'Is it ill?' said Dibbler.
'I'm afraid it always smells like that.'
'Don't you think it would be a good idea to give it a bath?'
A mutter on the edge of hearing said: 'Do you think it would be a good
idea to have your feet bitten right orf?'
Meanwhile, over Holy Wood, the fog thickened ...
The posters for Blown Away had been circulating in Ankh-Morpork for
several days, and interest was running at fever pitch.
They'd even got as far as the University this time. The Librarian had
one pinned up in the fetid, booklined nest he called home,[24] and various
others were surreptitiously circulating among the wizards themselves.
The artist had produced a masterpiece. Held in Victor's arms, against
the background of the flaming city, Ginger was portrayed as not only showing
nearly all she had but quite a lot of what she had not, strictly speaking,
got.
The effect on the wizards was everything that Dibbler could possibly
have hoped for. In the Uncommon Room, the poster was passed from hand to
shaking hand as if it might explode.
'There's a girl who's got It,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies. He
was one of the fattest wizards, and so overstuffed that he seemed to be
living up to his title. He looked as though horsehair should be leaking from
frayed patches.
People felt an overpowering urge to rummage down the side of him for
loose change.
'What's "It", Chair?' said another wizard.
'Oh, you know. It. Oomph. The old wayheyhey.'
They watched him politely and expectantly, like people awaiting the
punch line.
'Good grief, do I have to spell it out?' he said.
'He means sexual magnetism,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes,
happily. 'The lure of wanton soft bosoms and huge pulsating thighs, and the
forbidden fruits of desire which'
A couple of wizards carefully moved their chairs away from him.
'Ah, sex,' said the Dean of Pentacles, interrupting the Lecturer in
Recent Runes in midsigh. 'Far too much of it these days, in my opinion.'
'Oh, I don't know,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes. He looked
wistful.
The noise woke up Windle Poons, who had been dozing in his wheelchair
by the fire. There was always a roaring fire in the Uncommon Room, summer or
winter.
'Wassat?' he said.
The Dean leaned towards an ear.
'I was saying', he said loudly, 'that we didn't know the meaning of the
word "sex" when we were young.'
'That's true. That's very true,' said Poons. He stared reflectively at
the flames. 'Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?'
There was a moment's silence.
'Say what you like, she's a fine figure of a young woman,' said the
Lecturer in Recent Runes defiantly.
'Several young women,' said the Dean.
Windle Poons focused unsteadily on the poster.
'Who's the young feller?' he said.
'What young feller?' said several wizards.
'He's in the middle of the picture,' said Poons. 'He's holding her in
his arms.'
They looked again. 'Oh, him,' said the Chair, dismissively.
'Seems to me I've, mm, seen him before,' said Poons.
'My dear Poons, I hope you haven't been sneaking off to the moving
pictures,' said the Dean, grinning at the others. 'You know it's demeaning
for a wizard to patronize the common entertainments. The Archchancellor
would be very angry with us.'
'Wassat?' said Poons, cupping a hand to his ear.
'He does look a bit familiar, now that you mention it,' said the Dean,
peering at the poster.
The Lecturer in Recent Runes put his head on one side.
'It's young Victor, isn't it?' he said.
'Eh?' said Poons.
'You know, you could be right,' said the Chair of Indefinite Studies.
'He had the same type of weedy moustache.'
'Who's this?' said Poons.
'But he was a student. He could have been a wizard,' said the Dean.
'Why would he want to go off and fondle young women?'
'It's a Victor all right, but not our Victor. Says here he's "Victor
Maraschino",' said the Chair.
'Oh, that's just a click name,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes
airily. 'They all have funny names like that. Delores De Syn and Blanche
Languish and Rock Cliffe and so on ... ' He realized that they were looking
at him accusingly.
'Or so I'm told,' he added lamely. 'By the porter. He goes to see a
click nearly every night.'
'What're you on about?' said Poons, waving his walking stick in the
air.
'The cook goes every night, too,' said the Chair. 'So do most of the
kitchen staff. You just try getting so much as a ham sandwich after nine
o'clock.'
'Just about everyone goes,' said the Lecturer. 'Except us.'
One of the other wizards peered intently at the bottom of the poster.
'It says here,' he said, ' "A Sarger of Passione and Broad Staircases
in AnkhMorpork's Turbelent Histry!" '
'Ah. It's historical, then, is it?' said the Lecturer.
'And it says "A Epic Love Story that Astoundede Goddes and Menne!!" '
'Oh? Religious, as well.'
'And it says, "Withe a 1,000 elephants!!!" '
'Ah. Wildlife. Always very educational, wildlife,' said the Chair,
looking speculatively at the Dean. The other wizards were doing so, too.
'It seems to me', said the Lecturer, slowly, 'that noone could possibly
object to senior wizards viewing a work of historical, religious and, er,
wildliforific interest.'
'University rules are very specific,' said the Dean, but not very
enthusiastically.
'But surely only meant for the students,' said the Lecturer. 'I can
quite understand that students shouldn't be allowed to watch something like
this.
They'd probably whistle and throw things at the screen. But it couldn't
be seriously suggested, could it, that senior wizards such as ourselves
shouldn't examine this popular phenomenon?'
Poons' flailing walking stick caught the Dean sharply across the back
of his legs.
'I demand to know what everyone's talking about!' he snapped.
'We don't see why senior wizards shouldn't be allowed to watch moving
pictures!' bellowed the Chair.
'Jolly good thing, too!' snapped Poons. 'Everyone likes to look at a
pretty woman.'
'Noone mentioned anything about any pretty women. We were far more
interested in examining popular phenomenons,' said the Chair.
'Call it what you like, mm?' cackled Windle Poons.
'If people see wizards strolling out of the gate and going into a
common movingpicture pit they'll lose all respect for the profession,' said
the Dean.
'It's not even as if it's proper magic. It's just trickery.'
'Y'know,' said one of the lesser wizards, thoughtfully, 'I've always
wondered exactly what these wretched clicks are. Some kind of puppet show,
are they? Are these people acting on a stage? Or a shadow play?'
'See?' said the Chair. 'We're supposed to be wise, and we don't even
know.'
They all looked at the Dean.
'Yes, but who wants to see a lot of young women dancing around in
tights?' he said, hopelessly.
Ponder Stibbons, luckiest postgraduate wizard in the history of the
University, sauntered happily towards the secret entrance over the wall. His
otherwise uncrowded mind was pleasantly awash with thoughts of beer and
maybe a visit to the clicks and maybe a Klatchian extrahot curry to round
off the evening, and then-
It was the second worst moment in his life.
They were all there. All the senior staff. Even the Dean. Even old
Poons in his wheelchair. All standing there in the shadows, looking at him
very sternly.
Paranoia exploded its dark fireworks in the dustbin of his mind. They
were all waiting just for him.
He froze.
The Dean spoke.
'Oh. Oh. Oh. Er. Ah. Um. Um,' he began, and then seemed to catch up
with his tongue. 'Oh. What's this? Forward this minute, that man!'
Ponder hesitated. Then he ran for it.
After a while the Lecturer in Recent Runes said, 'That was young
Stibbons, wasn't it? Has he gone?'
'I think so.'
'He's bound to say something to someone.'
'No he won't,' said the Dean.
'Do you think he saw where we'd taken out the bricks?'
'No, I was standing in front of the holes,' said the Chair.
'Come on, then. Where were we?'
'Look, I really think this is most unwise,' said the Dean.
'Just shut up, old chap, and hold this brick.'
'Very well, but tell me this; how do you propose to get the wheelchair
over?'
They looked at Poons' wheelchair.
There are wheelchairs which are lightweight and built to let their
owners function fully and independently in modern society. To the thing
inhabited by Poons, they were as gazelles to a hippopotamus. Poona was well
aware of his function in modern society, and as far as he was concerned it
was to be pushed everywhere and generally pandered to.
It was wide and long and steered by means of a little front wheel and a
long castiron handle. Cast iron, in fact, featured largely in its
construction. Bits of baroque ironwork adorned its frame, which seemed to
have been made of iron drainpipes welded together. The rear wheels did not
in fact have blades affixed to them, but looked as though these were
optional extras. There were various dread levers which only Poons knew the
purpose of. There was a huge oilskin hood that could be erected in a matter
of hours to protect its occupant from showers, storms and, probably, meteor
strikes and falling buildings. By way of fight relief, the front handle was
adorned with a selection of trumpets, hooters and whistles, with which Poons
was wont to announce his progress around the passages and quadrangles of the
University. For the fact was that although the wheelchair needed all the
efforts of one strong man to get it moving it had, once actually locomotive,
a sort of ponderous unstoppability; it may have had brakes, but Windle Poons
had never bothered to find out. Staff and students alike knew that the only
hope of survival, if they heard a honk or a blast at close range, was to
flatten themselves against the nearest wall while the dreaded conveyance
rattled by.
'We'll never get that over,' said the Dean firmly. 'It must weigh at
least a ton. We ought to leave him behind, anyway. He's too old for this
sort of thing.'
'When I was a lad I was over this wall, nun, every night,' said Poons,
resentfully. He chuckled. 'We had some scrapes in those days, I can tell
you. If
I had a penny, mm, for every time the Watch chased me home,' his
ancient lips moved in a sudden frenzy of calculation, 'I'd have
fivepenceha'penny.'
'Maybe if we' the Chair began, and then said 'What do you mean,
fivepenceha'penny?'
'I recall once they gave up halfway,' said Poons, happily. 'Oh, those
were great times. I remember me and old "Numbers" Riktor and "Tudgy" Spold
climbed up on the Temple of Small Gods, you see, in the middle of a service,
and Tudgy had got this piglet in a sack, and he'
'See what you've done?' complained the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
'You've set him off now.'
'We could try lifting it by magic,' said the Chair. 'Gindle's
Effortless Elevator should do the trick.'
'-and then the high priest turned around and, heh, the look on his
face! And then old Numbers said, let's'
'It's hardly a very dignified use of magic,' sniffed the Dean.
'Considerably more dignified than heaving the bloody thing over the
wall ourselves, wouldn't you say?' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes,
rolling up his sleeves. 'Come on, lads.'
'and next thing, Pimple was hammering on the door of the Assassins'
Guild, and then old Scummidge, who was the porter there, heehee, he was a
right terror, anyway, he came out, mm, and then the guards come around the
corner'
'All ready? Right!'
'which puts me in mind of the time me and "Cucumber" Framer got some
glue and went round to'
'Up your end, Dean!'
The wizards grunted with effort.
'and, mm, I can remember it as if it was only yesterday, the look on
his face when'
'Now lower away!'
The ironshod wheels clanged gently on the cobbles of the alley.
Poons nodded amiably. 'Great times. Great times,' he muttered, and fell
asleep. The wizards climbed slowly and unsteadily over the wall, ample
backsides gleaming in the moonlight, and stood wheezing gently on the far
side.
'Tell me, Dean,' said the Lecturer, leaning on the wall to stop the
shaking in his legs, 'have we made ... the wall ... higher in the last fifty
years?'
'I ... don't ... think ... so.'
'Odd. Used to go up it like a gazelle. Not many years ago. Not many at
all, really.'
The wizards wiped their foreheads and looked sheepishly at one another.
'Used to nip over for a pint or three most nights,' said the Chair.
'I used to study in the evenings,' said the Dean, primly.
The Chair narrowed his eyes.
'Yes, you always did,' he said. 'I recall.'
It was dawning on the wizards that they were outside the University, at
night and without permission, for the first time in decades. A certain
suppressed excitement crackled from man to man. Any watcher trained in
reading body language would have been prepared to bet that, after the click,
someone was going to suggest that they might as well go somewhere and have a
few drinks, and then someone else would fancy a meal, and then there was
always room for a few more drinks, and then it would be 5 a.m. and the city
guards would be respectfully knocking on the University gates and asking if
the Archchancellor would care to step down to the cells to identify some
alleged wizards who were singing an obscene song in sixpart harmony, and
perhaps he would also care to bring some money to pay for all the damage.
Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened.
The Chair reached up and grasped the brim of his tall, wide and floppy
wizarding hat.
'Right, boys,' he said. 'Hats off.'
They dehatted, but with reluctance. A wizard gets very attached to his
pointy hat. It gives him a sense of identity. But, as the Chair had pointed
out earlier, if people knew you were a wizard because you were wearing a
pointy hat, then if you took the pointy hat off, they'd think you were just
some rich merchant or something.
The Dean shuddered. 'It feels like I've taken all my clothes off,' he
said.
'We can tuck them in under Poons' blanket,' said the Chair. 'No-one'll
know it's us.'
'Yes,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, 'but will we?'
'They'll just think we're, well, solid burghers.'
'That's just what I feel like,' said the Dean. 'A solid burgher.' j
'Or merchants,' said the Chair. He smoothed back his white hair.
'Remember,' he said, 'if anyone says anything, we're not wizards. Just
honest merchants out for an enjoyable evening, right?'
'What does an honest merchant look like?' said a wizard.
'How should I know?' said the Chair. 'So noone is to do any magic,' he
went on.
'I don't have to tell you what'll happen if the Archchancellor hears
that his staff has been seen at the common entertainments.'
'I'm more worried about our students finding out,' shuddered the Dean.
'False beards,' said the Lecturer in Recent Runes, triumphantly. 'We
should wear false beards.'
The Chair rolled his eyes.
'We've all GOT beards,' he said. 'What kind of disguise would false
beards be?'
'Ah! That's the clever bit,' said the Lecturer. 'Noone would suspect
that anyone wearing a false beard would have a real beard underneath, would
they?'
The Chair opened his mouth to refute this, and then hesitated.
'Well' he said.
'But where'd we get false beards at this time of night?' said a wizard
doubtfully.
The Lecturer beamed, and reached into his pocket. 'We don't have to,'
he said.
'That's the really clever bit: I brought some wire with me, you see,
and all you need do is break two bits off, twiddle them into your sideburns,
then loop them over your ears rather clumsily like this,' he demonstrated,
'and there you are.'
The Chair stared.
'Uncanny,' he said, at last. 'It's true! You look just like someone
wearing a very badlymade false beard.'
'Amazing, isn't it?' said the Lecturer happily, passing out the wire.
'It's headology, you know.'
There were a few minutes of busy twanging and the occasional whimper as
a wizard punctured himself with wire, but eventually they were ready. They
looked shyly at one another.
'If we got a pillow case without a pillow in it and shoved it down
inside the Chair's robe so the top was showing, he'd look just like a thin
man making himself tremendously fat with a huge pillow,' said one of them
enthusiastically.
He caught the Chair's eye, and went quiet.
A couple of wizards grasped the handles of Poons' terrible wheelchair
and started it rumbling over the damp cobbles.
'Wassat? What's everyone doing?' said Poons, suddenly waking up.
'We're going to play solid burghers,' said the Dean.
'That's a good game,' said Poons.
'Can you hear me, old chap?'
The Bursar opened his eyes.
The University sanitarium wasn't very big, and was seldom used. Wizards
tended to be either in rude health, or dead. The only medicine they
generally required was an antacid formula and a dark room until lunch.
'Brought you something to read,' said the voice, diffidently.
The Bursar managed to focus on the spine of Adventures with Crossbow
and Rod.
'Nasty knock you had there, Bursar. Been asleep all day.'
The Bursar looked blearily at the pink and orange haze, which gradually
refined itself into the Archchancellor's pink and orange face.
Let's see, he thought, exactly how did I
He sat bolt upright and grabbed the Archchancellor's robe and screamed
into the big pink and orange face: 'Something dreadful's going to happen!'
The wizards strolled through the twilight streets. So far the disguise
was working perfectly. People were even jostling them. Noone ever knowingly
jostled a wizard. It was a whole new experience.
There was a huge crowd of people outside the entrance to the Odium, and
a queue that stretched down the street. The Dean ignored it, and led the
party straight up to the doors, whereupon someone said 'Oi!'
He looked up at a redfaced troll in an illfitting militarylooking
outfit that included epaulettes the size of kettledrums and no trousers.
'Yes?' he said.
'There are a queue, you know,' said the troll.
The Dean nodded politely. In AnkhMorpork a queue was, almost by
definition, something with a wizard at the head of it. 'So I see,' he said.
'And a very good thing, too. And if you will be so good as to stand aside,
we'd like to take our seats.'
The troll prodded him in the stomach.
'What you fink you are?' he said. 'A wizard or something?' This got a
laugh from the nearest queuers.
The Dean leaned closer.
'As a matter of fact, we are wizards,' he hissed.
The troll grinned at him.
'Don't come the raw trilobite with me,' he said. 'I can see your false
beard!'
'Now listen-' the Dean began, but his voice became an incoherent squeak
as the troll picked him up by the collar of his robe and propelled him out
into the road.
'You get in queue like everyone else,' he said. There was a chorus of
jeers from the queue.
The Dean growled and raised his right hand, fingers spread
The ...
