Watch…

This is space. It’s sometimes called the final frontier.

(Except that of course you can’t have a final frontier, because there’d be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it’s pretty penultimate…)

And against the wash of stars a nebula hangs, vast and black, one red giant gleaming like the madness of gods…

And then the gleam is seen as the glint in a giant eye and it is eclipsed by the blink of an eyelid and the darkness moves a flipper and Great A’Tuin, star turtle, swims onward through the void.

On its back, four giant elephants. On their shoulders, rimmed with water, glittering under its tiny orbiting sunlet, spinning majestically around the mountains at its frozen Hub, lies the Discworld, world and mirror of worlds.

Nearly unreal.

Reality is not digital, an on-off state, but analog. Something gradual. In other words, reality is a quality that things possess in the same way that they possess, say, weight. Some people are more real than others, for example. It has been estimated that there are only about five hundred real people on any given planet, which is why they keep unexpectedly running into one another all the time.

The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist.

And just real enough to be in real trouble.

 

About thirty miles Turnwise of Ankh-Morpork the surf boomed on the wind-blown, seagrass-waving, sand-dune-covered spit of land where the Circle Sea met the Rim Ocean.

The hill itself was visible for miles. It wasn’t very high, but lay among the dunes like an upturned boat or a very unlucky whale, and was covered in scrub trees. No rain fell here, if it could possibly avoid it. Although the wind sculpted the dunes around it, the low summit of the hill remained in an everlasting, ringing calm.

Nothing but the sand had changed here in hundreds of years.

Until now.

A crude hut of driftwood had been built on the long curve of the beach, although describing it as “built” was a slander on skilled crude hut builders throughout the ages; if the sea had simply been left to pile the wood up it might have done a better job.

And, inside, an old man had just died.

“Oh,” he said. He opened his eyes and looked around the interior of the hut. He hadn’t seen it very clearly for the past ten years.

Then he swung, if not his legs, then at least the memory of his legs off the pallet of sea-heather and stood up. Then he went outside, into the diamond-bright morning. He was interested to see that he was still wearing a ghostly image of his ceremonial robe—stained and frayed, but still recognizable as having originally been a dark red plush with gold frogging—even though he was dead. Either your clothes died when you did, he thought, or maybe you just mentally dressed yourself from force of habit.

Habit also led him to the pile of driftwood beside the hut. When he tried to gather a few sticks, though, his hands passed through them.

He swore.

It was then that he noticed a figure standing by the water’s edge, looking out to sea. It was leaning on a scythe. The wind whipped at its black robes.

He started to hobble toward it, remembered he was dead, and began to stride. He hadn’t stridden for decades, but it was amazing how it all came back to you.

Before he was halfway to the dark figure, it spoke to him.

DECCAN RIBOBE, it said.

“That’s me.”

LAST KEEPER OF THE DOOR.

“Well, I suppose so.”

Death hesitated.

YOU ARE OR YOU AREN’T, he said.

Deccan scratched his nose. Of course, he thought, you have to be able to touch yourself. Otherwise you’d fall to bits.

“Technic’ly, a Keeper has to be invested by the High Priestess,” he said. “And there ain’t been a High Priestess for thousands o’ years. See, I just learned it all from old Tento, who lived here before me. He jus’ said to me one day, ‘Deccan, it looks as though I’m dyin’, so it’s up to you now, ’cos if there’s no one left that remembers properly it’ll all start happening again and you know what that means.’ Well, fair enough. But that’s not what you’d call a proper investmenting, I’d say.”

He looked up at the sandy hill.

“There was jus’ me and him,” he said. “And then jus’ me, remembering Holy Wood. And now…” He raised his hand to his mouth.

“Oo-er,” he said.

YES, said Death.

It would be wrong to say a look of panic passed across Deccan Ribobe’s face, because at that moment it was several yards away and wearing a sort of fixed grin, as if it had seen the joke at last. But his spirit was definitely worried.

“See, the thing is,” it said hastily, “no one ever comes here, see, apart from the fishermen from the next bay, and they just leaves the fish and runs off on account of superstition and I couldn’t sort of go off to find an apprentice or somethin’ because of keepin’ the fires alight and doin’ the chantin’…”

YES.

“…It’s a terrible responsibility, bein’ the only one able to do your job…”

YES, said Death.

“Well, of course, I’m not telling you anything…”

NO.

“…I mean, I was hopin’ someone’d get shipwrecked or somethin’, or come treasure huntin’, and I could explain it like old Tento explained it to me, teach ’em the chants, get it all sorted out before I died…”

YES?

“I s’pose there’s no chance that I could sort of…”

NO.

“Thought not,” said Deccan despondently.

He looked at the waves crashing down on the shore.

“Used to be a big city down there, thousands of years ago,” he said. “I mean, where the sea is. When it’s stormy you can hear the ole temple bells ringin’ under the sea.”

I KNOW.

“I used to sit out here on windy nights, listenin’. Used to imagine all them dead people down there, ringin’ the bells.”

AND NOW WE MUST GO.

“Ole Tento said there was somethin’ under the hill there that could make people do things. Put strange fancies in their ’eads,” said Deccan, reluctantly following the stalking figure. “I never had any strange fancies.”

BUT YOU WERE CHANTING, said Death. He snapped his fingers.

A horse ceased trying to graze the sparse dune grass and trotted up to Death. Deccan was surprised to see that it left hoofprints in the sand. He’d have expected sparks, or at least fused rock.

“Er,” he said, “can you tell me, er…what happens now?”

Death told him.

“Thought so,” said Deccan glumly.

Up on the low hill the fire that had been burning all night collapsed in a shower of ash. A few embers still glowed, though.

Soon they would go out….

…

..

.

They went out..

..

…

….

Nothing happened for a whole day. Then, in a little hollow on the edge of the brooding hill, a few grains of sand shifted and left a tiny hole.

Something emerged. Something invisible. Something joyful and selfish and marvelous. Something as intangible as an idea, which is exactly what it was. A wild idea.

It was old in a way not measurable by any calendar known to Man and what it had, right now, was memories and needs. It remembered life, in other times and other universes. It needed people.

It rose against the stars, changing shape, coiling like smoke.

There were lights on the horizon.

It liked lights.

It regarded them for a few seconds and then, like an invisible arrow, extended itself toward the city and sped away.

It liked action, too…

And several weeks went past.

 

There’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.

At least, there’s a saying that there’s a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.

And it’s wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

Poets long ago gave up trying to describe the city. Now the more cunning ones try to excuse it. They say, well, maybe it is smelly, maybe it is overcrowded, maybe it is a bit like Hell would be if they shut the fires off and stabled a herd of incontinent cows there for a year, but you must admit that it is full of sheer, vibrant, dynamic life. And this is true, even though it is poets that are saying it. But people who aren’t poets say, so what? Mattresses tend to be full of life too, and no one writes odes to them. Citizens hate living there and, if they have to move away on business or adventure or, more usually, until some statute of limitations runs out, can’t wait to get back so they can enjoy hating living there some more. They put stickers on the backs of their carts saying “Ankh-Morpork—Loathe It or Leave It.” They call it The Big Wahooni, after the fruit. ¹

Every so often a ruler of the city builds a wall around Ankh-Morpork, ostensibly to keep enemies out. But Ankh-Morpork doesn’t fear enemies. In fact it welcomes enemies, provided they are enemies with money to spend. ² It has survived flood, fire, hordes, revolutions and dragons. Sometimes by accident, admittedly, but it has survived them. The cheerful and irrecoverably venal spirit of the city has been proof against anything…

Until now.

 

Boom.

The explosion removed the windows, the door and most of the chimney.

It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of alchemists. The neighbors preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.

Explosions were part of the scenery, such as was left.

And this one was pretty good, even by the standards of local connoisseurs. There was a deep red heart to the billowing black smoke which you didn’t often see. The bits of semi-molten brickwork were more molten than usual. It was, they considered, quite impressive.

Boom.

A minute or two after the explosion a figure lurched out of the ragged hole where the door had been. It had no hair, and what clothes it still had were on fire.

It staggered up to the small crowd that was admiring the devastation and by chance laid a sooty hand on a hot-meat-pie-and-sausage-in-a-bun salesman called Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, who had an almost magical ability to turn up wherever a sale might be made.

“Looking,” it said, in a dreamy, stunned voice, “f’r a word. Tip of my tongue.”

“Blister?” volunteered Throat.

He recovered his commercial senses. “After an experience like that,” he added, proffering a pastry case full of so much reclaimed organic debris that it was very nearly sapient, “what you need is to get a hot meat pie inside you—”

“Nonono. ’S not blister. ’S what you say when you’ve discovered something. You goes running out into the street shoutin’,” said the smouldering figure urgently. “’S’pecial word,” it added, its brow creasing under the soot.

The crowd, reluctantly satisfied that there were going to be no more explosions, gathered around. This might be nearly as good.

“Yeah, that’s right,” said an elderly man, filling his pipe.

“You runs out shouting ‘Fire! Fire!’” He looked triumphant.

“’S not that…”

“Or ‘Help!’ or—”

“No, he’s right,” said a woman with a basket of fish on her head. “There’s a special word. It’s foreign.”

“Right, right,” said her neighbor. “Special foreign word for people who’ve discovered something. It was invented by some foreign bugger in his bath—”

“Well,” said the pipe man, lighting it off the alchemist’s smouldering hat, “I for one don’t see why people in this city need to go around shouting heathen lingo just ’cos they’ve had a bath. Anyway, look at him. He ain’t had a bath. He needs a bath, yes, but he ain’t had one. What’s he want to go around shouting foreign lingo for? We’ve got perfectly satisfactory words for shoutin’.”

“Like what?” said Cut-me-own-Throat.

The pipe-smoker hesitated. “Well,” he said, “like…‘I’ve discovered something’…or…‘Hooray’…”

“No, I’m thinking about the bugger over Tsort way, or somewhere. He was in his bath and he had this idea for something, and he ran out down the street yelling.”

“Yelling what?”

“Dunno. P’raps ‘Give me a towel!’”

“Bet he’d be yellin’ all right if he tried that sort of thing around here,” said Throat cheerfully. “Now, ladies and gents, I have here some sausage in a bun that’d make your—”

“Eureka,” said the soot-colored one, swaying back and forth.

“What about it?” said Throat.

“No, that’s the word. Eureka.” A worried grin spread across the black features. “It means ‘I have it.’”

“Have what?” said Throat.

“It. At least, I had it. Octo-cellulose. Amazing stuff. Had it in my hand. But I held it too close to the fire,” said the figure, in the perplexed tones of the nearly concussed. “V’ry important fact. Mus’ make a note of it. Don’t let it get hot. V’ry important. Mus’ write down v’ry important fact.”

He tottered back into the smoking ruins.

Dibbler watched him go.

“Wonder what that was all about?” he said. Then he shrugged and raised his voice to a shout. “Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h’an’t noticed they’re gone!”

The glittering, swirling idea from the hill had watched all this. The alchemist didn’t even know it was there. All he knew was that he was being unusually inventive today.

Now it had spotted the pie merchant’s mind.

It knew that kind of mind. It loved minds like that. A mind that could sell nightmare pies could sell dreams.

It leaped.

On a hill far away the breeze stirred the cold, gray ash.

Further down the hill, in a crack in a hollow between two rocks where a dwarf juniper bush struggled for a living, a little trickle of sand began to move.

 

Boom.

A fine film of plaster dust drifted down onto the desk of Mustrum Ridcully, the new Archchancellor of Unseen University, just as he was trying to tie a particularly difficult fly.

He glanced out of the stained-glass window. A smoke cloud was rising over uptown Morpork.

“Bursaar!”

The Bursar arrived within a few seconds, out of breath. Loud noises always upset him.

“It’s the alchemists, Master,” he panted.

“That’s the third time this week. Blasted firework merchants,” muttered the Archchancellor.

“I’m afraid so, Master,” said the Bursar.

“What do they think they’re doing?”

“I really couldn’t say, Master,” said the Bursar, getting his breath back. “Alchemy has never interested me. It’s altogether too…too…”

“Dangerous,” said the Archchancellor firmly. “Lot of damn mixin’ things up and saying, hey, what’ll happen if we add a drop of the yellow stuff, and then goin’ around without yer eyebrows for a fortnight.”

“I was going to say impractical,” said the Bursar. “Trying to do things the hard way when we have perfectly simple everyday magic available.”

“I thought they were trying to cure the philosopher’s stones, or somethin’,” said the Archchancellor. “Lot of damn nonsense, if you ask me. Anyway, I’m off.”

As the Archchancellor began to sidle out of the room the Bursar hastily waved a handful of papers at him.

“Before you go, Archchancellor,” he said desperately, “I wonder if you would just care to sign a few—”

“Not now, man,” snapped the Archchancellor. “Got to see a man about a horse, what?”

“What?”

“Right.” The door closed.

The Bursar stared at it, and sighed.

Unseen University had had many different kinds of Archchancellor over the years. Big ones, small ones, cunning ones, slightly insane ones, extremely insane ones—they’d come, they’d served, in some cases not long enough for anyone to be able to complete the official painting to be hung in the Great Hall, and they’d died. The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.

However, from the Bursar’s point of view this didn’t really have to matter. The name might change occasionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor and the Archchancellor’s most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar’s point of view, without reading them first.

This one was different. For one thing, he was hardly ever in, except to change out of his muddy clothes. And he shouted at people. Usually at the Bursar.

And yet, at the time, it had seemed a really good idea to elect an Archchancellor who hadn’t set foot in the University in forty years.

There had been so much in-fighting between the various orders of wizardry in recent years that, just for once, the senior wizards had agreed that what the University needed was a period of stability, so that they could get on with their scheming and intriguing in peace and quiet for a few months. A search of the records turned up Ridcully the Brown who, after becoming a Seventh Level mage at the incredibly young age of twenty-seven, had quit the University in order to look after his family’s estates deep in the country.

He looked ideal.

“Just the chap,” they all said. “Clean sweep. New broom. A country wizard. Back to the thingumajigs, the roots of wizardry. Jolly old boy with a pipe and twinkly eyes. Sort of chap who can tell one herb from another, roams-the-high-forest-with-every-beast-his-brother kind of thing. Sleeps under the stars, like as not. Knows what the wind is saying, we shouldn’t wonder. Got a name for all the trees, you can bank on it. Speaks to the birds, too.”

A messenger had been sent. Ridcully the Brown had sighed, cursed a bit, found his staff in the kitchen garden where it had been supporting a scarecrow, and had set out.

“And if he’s any problem,” the wizards had added, in the privacy of their own heads, “anyone who talks to trees should be no trouble to get rid of.”

And then he’d arrived, and it turned out that Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was, “Winged you, yer bastard!”

The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They’d got so good at pattern-recognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they’d run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.

Within twelve hours of arriving, Ridcully had installed a pack of hunting dragons in the butler’s pantry, fired his dreadful crossbow at the ravens on the ancient Tower of Art, drunk a dozen bottles of red wine, and rolled off to bed at two in the morning singing a song with words in it that some of the older and more forgetful wizards had to look up.

And then he got up at five o’clock to go duck hunting down in the marshes on the estuary.

And came back complaining that there wasn’t a good trout fishin’ river for miles. (You couldn’t fish in the river Ankh; you had to jump up and down on the hooks even to make them sink.)

And he ordered beer with his breakfast.

And told jokes.

On the other hand, thought the Bursar, at least he didn’t interfere with the actual running of the University. Ridcully the Brown wasn’t the least interested in running anything except maybe a string of hounds. If you couldn’t shoot arrows at it, hunt it or hook it, he couldn’t see much point in it.

Beer at breakfast! The Bursar shuddered. Wizards weren’t at their best before noon, and breakfast in the Great Hall was a quiet, fragile occasion, broken only by coughs, the quiet shuffling of the servants, and the occasional groan. People shouting for kidneys and black pudding and beer were a new phenomenon.

The only person not terrified of the ghastly man was old Windle Poons, who was one hundred and thirty years old and deaf and, while an expert on ancient magical writings, needed adequate notice and a good run-up to deal with the present day. He’d managed to absorb the fact that the new Archchancellor was going to be one of those hedgerow-and-dickie-bird chappies, it would take a week or two for him to grasp the change of events, and in the meantime he made polite and civilized conversation based on what little he could remember about Nature and things.

On the lines of:

“I expect it must be a, mm, a change for you, mm, sleeping in a real bed, instead of under the, mm, stars?” And: “These things, mm, here, are called knives and forks, mm.” And: “This, mm, green stuff on the scrambled egg, mm, would it be parsley, do you think?”

But since the new Archchancellor never paid much attention to anything anyone said while he was eating, and Poons never noticed that he wasn’t getting any answers, they got along quite well.

Anyway, the Bursar had other problems.

The Alchemists, for one thing. You couldn’t trust alchemists. They were too serious-minded.

Boom.

And that was the last one. Whole days went by without being punctuated by small explosions. The city settled down again, which was a foolish thing to do.

What the Bursar failed to consider was that no more bangs doesn’t mean they’ve stopped doing it, whatever it is. It just means they’re doing it right.

 

It was midnight. The surf boomed on the beach, and made a phosphorescent glow in the night. Around the ancient hill, though, the sound seemed as dead as if it was arriving through several layers of velvet.

The hole in the sand was quite big now.

If you could put your ear to it, you might think you could hear applause.

 

It was still midnight. A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.

The Alchemists’ Guildhall was new. It was always new. It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.

On this night a number of muffled figures entered the building in a surreptitious fashion. After a few minutes the lights in a window on the top floor dimmed and went out.

Well, nearly out.

Something was happening up there. A strange flickering filled the window, very briefly. It was followed by a ragged cheering.

And there was a noise. Not a bang this time, but a strange mechanical purring, like a happy cat at the bottom of a tin drum.

It went clickaclickaclickaclicka…click.

It went on for several minutes, to a background of cheers. And then a voice said:

“That’s all, folks.”

 

“That’s all what?” said the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, next morning.

The man in front of him shivered with fear.

“Don’t know, lordship,” he said. “They wouldn’t let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.”

He twisted his fingers together nervously. The Patrician’s stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.

Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists’ Guild. He had once had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy. ³

“That’s all, lordship,” he whined. “There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.”

“Wrong? How?”

“Er. Dunno, sir. Just wrong, they said. They ought to go somewhere where it was better, they said. Uh. And they told me to go and get them some food.”

The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.

“Indeed,” he said.

“But they’d had their supper only fifteen minutes before,” the servant blurted out.

“Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,” said the Patrician.

“Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.”

“Indeed.” The Patrician looked down at the paperwork on his desk. “Thank you. You may go.”

“You know what, lordship? They liked them. They actually liked them!”

 

That the Alchemists had a Guild at all was remarkable. Wizards were just as uncooperative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn’t have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.

Whereas every alchemist was an alchemist alone, working in darkened rooms or hidden cellars and endlessly searching for the big casino—the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of Life. They tended to be thin, pink-eyed men, with beards that weren’t really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection, and many of them had that vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of boiling mercury.

It wasn’t that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn’t notice them, or thought they were walruses.

And so their tiny, despised Guild had never aspired to the powerful status of the Guilds of, say, the Thieves or the Beggars or the Assassins, but devoted itself instead to the aid of widows and families of those alchemists who had taken an overly relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide, for example, or had distilled some interesting fungi, drunk the result, and then stepped off the roof to play with the fairies. There weren’t actually very many widows and orphans, of course, because alchemists found it difficult to relate to other people long enough, and generally if they ever managed to marry it was only to have someone to hold their crucibles.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

Until now…

Now they were full of the nervous excitement of those who have found an unexpected fortune in their bank account and don’t know whether to draw people’s attention to it or simply take the lot and run.

“The wizards aren’t going to like it,” said one of them, a thin, hesitant man called Lully. “They’re going to call it magic. You know they get really pissed if they think you’re doing magic and you’re not a wizard.”

“There isn’t any magic involved,” said Thomas Silverfish, the president of the Guild.

“There’s the imps.”

“That’s not magic. That’s just ordinary occult.”

“Well, there’s the salamanders.”

“Perfectly normal natural history. Nothing wrong with that.”

“Well, all right. But they’ll call it magic. You know what they’re like.”

The alchemists nodded gloomily.

“They’re reactionaries,” said Sendivoge, the Guild secretary. “Bloated thaumocrats. And the other Guilds, too. What do they know about the march of progress? What do they care? They could have been doing something like this for years, but did they? Not them! Just think how we can make people’s lives so much…well, better. The possibilities are immense.”

“Educational,” said Silverfish.

“Historical,” said Lully.

“And of course there’s entertainment,” said Peavie, the Guild treasurer. He was a small, nervous man. Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.

“Well, yes. Obviously some entertainment,” said Silverfish.

“Some of the great historical dramas,” said Peavie. “Just picture the scene! You get some actors together, they act it just once, and people all over the Disc will be able to see it as many times as they like! A great saving in wages, by the way,” he added.

“But tastefully done,” said Silverfish. “We have a great responsibility to see that nothing is done which is in any way…” his voice trailed off, “…you know…coarse.”

“They’ll stop us,” said Lully darkly. “I know those wizards.”

“I’ve been giving that some thought,” said Silverfish.

“The light’s too bad here anyway. We agreed. We need clear skies. And we need to be a long way away. I think I know just the place.”

“You know, I can’t believe we’re doing this,” said Peavie.

“A month ago it was just a mad idea. And now it’s all worked! It’s just like magic! Only not magical, if you see what I mean,” he added quickly.

“Not just illusion, but real illusion,” said Lully.

“I don’t know if anyone’s thought about this,” said Peavie,

“but this could make us a bit of money. Um?”

“But that isn’t important,” said Silverfish.

“No. No, of course not,” muttered Peavie. He glanced at the others.

“Shall we watch it again?” he said, shyly. “I don’t mind turning the handle. And, and…well, I know I haven’t contributed very much to this project, but I did come up with this, er, this stuff.”

He pulled a very large bag from the pocket of his robe and dropped it on the table. It fell over, and a few fluffy, white misshapen balls rolled out.

The alchemists stared at it.

“What is it?” said Lully.

“Well,” said Peavie, uncomfortably, “what you do is, you take some corn, and you put it in, say, a Number 3 crucible, with some cooking oil, you see, and then you put a plate or something on top of it, and when you heat it up it goes bang, I mean, not seriously bang, and when it’s stopped banging you take the plate off and it’s metamorphosed into these, er, things…” He looked at their uncomprehending faces. “You can eat it,” he mumbled apologetically. “If you put butter and salt on it, it tastes like salty butter.”

Silverfish reached out a chemical-stained hand and cautiously selected a fluffy morsel. He chewed it thoughtfully.

“Don’t really know why I did it,” said Peavie, blushing.

“Just sort of had an idea that it was right.”

Silverfish went on chewing.

“Tastes like cardboard,” he said, after a while.

“Sorry,” said Peavie, trying to scoop the rest of the heap back into the sack. Silverfish laid a gentle hand on his arm.

“Mind you,” he said, selecting another puffed morsel, “it does have a certain something, doesn’t it? They do seem right. What did you say it’s called?”

“Hasn’t really got a name,” said Peavie. “I just call it banged grains.”

Silverfish took another one. “Funny how you want to go on eating them,” he said. “Sort of more-ish. Banged grains? Right. Anyway…gentlemen, let us turn the handle one more time.”

Lully started to wind the film back into the unmagical lantern.

“You were saying you knew a place where we could really build up the project and where the wizards wouldn’t bother us?” he said.

Silverfish grabbed a handful of banged grains.

“It’s along the coast a way,” he said. “Nice and sunny and no one ever goes there these days. Nothing there but some wind-blown old forest and a temple and sand dunes.”

“A temple? Gods can get really pissed if you—” Peavie began.

“Look,” said Silverfish, “the whole area’s been deserted for centuries. There’s nothing there. No people, no gods, no nothing. Just lots of sunlight and land, waiting for us. It’s our chance, lads. We’re not allowed to make magic, we can’t make gold, we can’t even make a living—so let’s make moving pictures. Let’s make history!”

The alchemists sat back and looked more cheerful.

“Yeah,” said Lully.

“Oh. Right,” said Peavie.

“Here’s to moving pictures,” said Sendivoge, holding up a handful of banged grains. “How’d you hear about this place?”

“Oh, I—” Silverfish stopped. He looked puzzled. “Don’t know,” he said, eventually. “Can’t…quite remember. Must have heard about it once and forgot it, and then it just popped into my head. You know how these things happen.”

“Yeah,” said Lully. “Like with me and the film. It was like I was remembering how to do it. Funny old tricks the mind can play.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“’S’n idea whose time has come, see.”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

“That must be it.”

A slightly worried silence settled over the table. It was the sound of minds trying to put their mental fingers on something that was bothering them.

The air seemed to glitter.

“What’s this place called?” said Lully, eventually.

“Don’t know what it was called in the old days,” said Silverfish, leaning back and pulling the banged grains toward him. “These days they call it the Holy Wood.”

“Holy Wood,” said Lully. “Sounds…familiar.”

There was another silence while they thought about it.

It was broken by Sendivoge.

“Oh, well,” he said cheerfully, “Holy Wood, here we come.”

“Yeah,” said Silverfish, shaking his head as if to dislodge a disquieting thought. “Funny thing, really. I’ve got this feeling…that we’ve been going there…all this time.”

 

Several thousand miles under Silverfish, Great A’Tuin the world turtle sculled dreamily on through the starry night.

Reality is a curve.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that there isn’t as much as there should be. According to some of the more mystical texts in the stacks of the library of Unseen University—

—the Discworld’s premier college of wizardry and big dinners, whose collection of books is so massive that it distorts Space and Time—

—at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.

Outside the boundaries of the universes lie the raw realities, the could-have-beens, the might-bes, the never-weres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.

Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in.

And reality leaks out.

The effect is like one of those deep-sea geysers of hot water, around which strange submarine creatures find enough warmth and food to make a brief, tiny oasis of existence in an environment where there shouldn’t be any existence at all.

The idea of Holy Wood leaked innocently and joyfully into the Discworld.

And reality leaked out.

And was found. For there are Things outside, whose ability to sniff out tiny frail conglomerations of reality made the thing with the sharks and the trace of blood seem very boring indeed.

They began to gather.

 

A storm slid in across the sand dunes but, where it reached the low hill, the clouds seemed to curve away. Only a few drops of rain hit the parched soil, and the gale became nothing more than a faint breeze.

It blew sand over the long-dead remains of a fire.

Further down the slope, near a hole that was now big enough for, say, a badger, a small rock dislodged itself and rolled away.

 

A month went by quickly. It didn’t want to hang around.

 

The Bursar knocked respectfully at the Archchancellor’s door and then opened it.

A crossbow bolt nailed his hat to the woodwork.

The Archchancellor lowered the bow and glared at him.

“Bloody dangerous thing to do, wasn’t it?” he said. “You could have caused a nasty accident.”

The Bursar hadn’t got where he was today, or rather where he had been ten seconds ago, which was where a calm and self-assured personality was, rather than where he was now, which was on the verge of a mild heart attack, without a tremendous ability to recover from unexpected upsets.

He unpinned his hat from the target chalked on the ancient woodwork.

“No harm done,” he said. No voice could be as calm as that without tremendous effort. “You can barely see the hole. Why, er, are you shooting at the door, Master?”

“Use your common sense, man! It’s dark outside and the damn walls are made of stone. You don’t expect me to shoot at the damn walls?”

“Ah,” said the Bursar. “The door is, er, five hundred years old, you know,” he added, with finely-tuned reproach.

“Looks it,” said the Archchancellor, bluntly. “Damn great black thing. What we need around here, man, is a lot less stone and wood and a bit more jolliness. A few sportin’ prints, yer know. An ornament or two.”

“I shall see to it directly,” lied the Bursar smoothly. He remembered the sheaf of papers under his arm. “In the meantime, Master, perhaps you would care to—”

“Right,” said the Archchancellor, ramming his pointed hat on his head. “Good man. Now, got a sick dragon to see to. Little devil hasn’t touched his tar oil for days.”

“Your signature on one or two of—” the Bursar burbled hurriedly.

“Can’t be havin’ with all that stuff,” said the Archchancellor, waving him away. “Too much damn paper around here as it is. And—” He stared through the Bursar, as if he had just remembered something. “Saw a funny thing this mornin’,” he said. “Saw a monkey in the quad. Bold as brass.”

“Oh, yes,” said the Bursar, cheerfully. “That would be the Librarian.”

“Got a pet, has he?”

“No, you misunderstand me, Archchancellor,” said the Bursar cheerfully. “That was the Librarian.”

The Archchancellor stared at him.

The Bursar’s smile began to glaze.

“The Librarian’s a monkey?”

It took some time for the Bursar to explain matters clearly, and then the Archchancellor said: “What yer tellin’ me, then, is that this chap got himself turned into a monkey by magic?”

“An accident in the Library, yes. Magical explosion. One minute a human, next minute an orangutan. And you mustn’t call him a monkey, Master. He’s an ape.”

“Same damn difference, surely?”

“Apparently not. He gets very, er, aggressive if you call him a monkey.”

“He doesn’t stick his bottom at people, does he?”

The Bursar closed his eyes and shuddered. “No, Master. You’re thinking of baboons.”

“Ah.” The Archchancellor considered this. “Haven’t got any of them workin’ here, then?”

“No, Master. Just the Librarian, Master.”

“Can’t have it. Can’t have it, yer know. Can’t have damn great hairy things shambling around the place,” said the Archchancellor firmly. “Get rid of him.”

“Good grief, no! He’s the best Librarian we’ve ever had. And tremendous value for money.”

“Why? What d’we pay him?”

“Peanuts,” said the Bursar promptly. “Besides, he’s the only one who knows how the Library actually works.”

“Turn him back, then. No life for a man, bein’ a monkey.”

“Ape, Archchancellor. And he seems to prefer it, I’m afraid.”

“How d’yer know?” said the Archchancellor suspiciously.

“Speaks, does he?”

The Bursar hesitated. There was always this trouble with the Librarian. Everyone had got so accustomed to him it was hard to remember a time when the Library was not run by a yellow-fanged ape with the strength of three men. If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal. It was just that, when you came to explain it to a third party, it sounded odd. He coughed nervously.

“He says ‘oook,’ Archchancellor,” he said.

“And what’s that mean?”

“Means ‘no,’ Archchancellor.”

“And how does he say ‘yes,’ then?”

The Bursar had been dreading this. “‘Oook,’ Archchancellor,” he said.

“That was the same oook as the other oook!”

“Oh, no. No. I assure you. There’s a different inflection…I mean, when you get used to…,” the Bursar shrugged. “I suppose we’ve just got into the way of understanding him, Archchancellor.”

“Well, at least he keeps himself fit,” said the Archchancellor nastily. “Not like the rest of you fellows. I went into the Uncommon Room this morning, and it was full of chaps snoring!”

“That would be the senior masters, Master,” said the Bursar. “I would say they are supremely fit, myself.”

“Fit? The Dean looks like a man who’s swallered a bed!”

“Ah, but Master,” said the Bursar, smiling indulgently,

“the word ‘fit,’ as I understand it, means ‘appropriate to a purpose,’ and I would say the body of the Dean is supremely appropriate to the purpose of sitting around all day and eating big heavy meals.” The Bursar permitted himself a little smile.

The Archchancellor gave him a look so old-fashioned it might have belonged to an ammonite.

“That a joke?” he said, in the suspicious tones of someone who wouldn’t really understand the term “sense of humor” even if you sat down for an hour and explained it to him with diagrams.

“I was just making an observation, Master,” said the Bursar cautiously.

The Archchancellor shook his head. “Can’t stand jokes. Can’t stand chaps goin’ round tryin’ to be funny the whole time. Comes of spendin’ too much time sitting indoors. A few twenty-mile runs and the Dean’d be a different man.”

“Well, yes,” said the Bursar. “He’d be dead.”

“He’d be healthy.”

“Yes, but still dead.”

The Archchancellor irritably shuffled the papers on his desk.

“Slackness,” he muttered. “Far too much of it going on. Whole place gone to pot. People goin’ round sleepin’ all day and turnin’ into monkeys the whole time. We never even thought of turnin’ into a monkey when I was a student.” He looked up irritably.

“What was it you wanted?” he snapped.

“What?” said the Bursar, unnerved.

“You wanted me to do somethin’, didn’t you? You came in to ask me to do somethin’. Probably because I’m the only feller here not fast asleep or sittin’ in a tree whoopin’ every mornin’,” the Archchancellor added.

“Er. I think that’s gibbons, Archchancellor.”

“What? What? Do try and make some sense, man!”

The Bursar pulled himself together. He didn’t see why he had to be treated like this.

“In fact, I wanted to see you about one of the students, Master,” he said coldly.

“Students?” barked the Archchancellor.

“Yes, Master. You know? They’re the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we’re a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats—”

“I thought we paid people to deal with ’em.”

“The teaching staff. Yes. But sometimes…well, I wonder, Archchancellor, if you would care to look at these examination results…”

 

It was midnight—not the same midnight as before, but a very similar midnight. Old Tom, the tongueless bell in the University bell tower, had just tolled its twelve sonorous silences.

Rainclouds squeezed their last few drops over the city. Ankh-Morpork sprawled under a few damp stars, as real as a brick.

Ponder Stibbons, student wizard, put down his book and rubbed his face.

“All right,” he said. “Ask me anything. Go on. Anything at all.”

Victor Tugelbend, student wizard, picked up his battered copy of Necrotelicomnicon Discussed for Students, with Practical Experiments and turned the pages at random. He was lying on Ponder’s bed. At least, his shoulder blades were. His body extended up the wall. This is a perfectly normal position for a student taking his ease.

“OK,” he said. “Right. OK? What, right, what is the name of the outer-dimensional monster whose distinctive cry is ‘Yerwhatyerwhatyerwhat’?”

“Yob Soddoth,” said Ponder promptly.

“Yeah. How does the monster Tshup Aklathep, Infernal Star Toad with A Million Young, torture its victims to death?”

“It…don’t tell me…it holds them down and shows them pictures of its children until their brains implode.”

“Yep. Always wondered how that happens, myself,” said Victor, flicking through the pages. “I suppose after you’ve said ‘Yes, he’s got your eyes’ for the thousandth time you’re about ready to commit suicide in any case.”

“You know an awful lot, Victor,” said Ponder admiringly.

“I’m amazed you’re still a student.”

“Er, yes,” said Victor. “Er. Just unlucky at exams, I guess.”

“Go on,” said Ponder, “Ask me one more.”

Victor opened the book again.

There was a moment’s silence.

Then he said, “Where’s Holy Wood?”

Ponder shut his eyes and pounded his forehead. “Hang on, hang on…don’t tell me…” He opened his eyes. “What do you mean, where’s Holy Wood?” he added sharply. “I don’t remember anything about any Holy Wood.”

Victor stared down at the page. There was nothing about any Holy Wood there.

“I could have sworn I heard…I think my mind must be wandering,” he finished lamely. “It must be all this revision.”

“Yes. It really gets to you, doesn’t it? But it’ll be worth it, to be a wizard.”

“Yes,” said Victor. “Can’t wait.”

Ponder shut the book.

“Rain’s stopped. Let’s go over the wall,” he said. “We deserve a drink.”

Victor waggled a finger. “Just one drink, then. Got to keep sober,” he said. “It’s Finals tomorrow. Got to keep a clear head!”

“Huh!” said Ponder.

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

But Victor had a special reason for keeping alert.

He might make a mistake, and pass.

His dead uncle had left him a small fortune not to be a wizard. He hadn’t realized it when he’d drawn up the will, but that’s what the old man had done. He thought he was helping his nephew through college, but Victor Tugelbend was a very bright young lad in an oblique sort of way and had reasoned thusly:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a wizard? Well, you got a certain amount of prestige, but you were often in dangerous situations and certainly always at risk of being killed by a fellow mage. He saw no future in being a well-respected corpse.

On the other hand…

What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a student wizard? You got quite a lot of free time, a certain amount of license in matters like drinking a lot of ale and singing bawdy songs, no one tried to kill you much except in the ordinary, everyday Ankh-Morpork way of things and, thanks to the legacy, you also got a modest but comfortable style of living. Of course, you didn’t get much in the way of prestige but at least you were alive to know this.

So Victor had devoted a considerable amount of energy in studying firstly the terms of the will, the byzantine examination regulations of Unseen University, and every examination paper of the last fifty years.

The pass mark in Finals was 88.

Failing would be easy. Any idiot can fail.

Victor’s uncle had been no fool. One of the conditions of the legacy was that, should Victor ever achieve a mark of less than 80, the money supply would dry up like thin spit on a hot stove.

He’d won, in a way. Few students had ever studied as hard as Victor. It was said that his knowledge of magic rivaled that of some of the top wizards. He spent hours in a comfy chair in the Library, reading grimoires. He researched answer formats and exam techniques. He listened to lectures until he could quote them by heart. He was generally considered by the staff to be the brightest and certainly the busiest student for decades and, at every Finals, he carefully and competently got a mark of 84.

It was uncanny.

 

The Archchancellor reached the last page.

Eventually he said: “Ah. I see. Feel sorry for the lad, do you?”

“I don’t think you quite see what I mean,” said the Bursar.

“Fairly obvious to me,” said the Archchancellor. “Lad keeps coming within an ace of passin’.” He pulled out one of the papers. “Anyway, it says here he passed three years ago. Got 91.”

“Yes, Archchancellor. But he appealed.”

“Appealed? Against passin’?”

“He said he didn’t think the examiners had noticed that he got the allotropes of octiron wrong in question six. He said he couldn’t live with his conscience. He said it would haunt him for the rest of his days if he succeeded unfairly over better and more worthy students. You’ll notice he got only 82 and 83 in the next two exams.”

“Why’s that?”

“We think he was playing safe, Master.”

The Archchancellor drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Can’t have this,” he said. “Can’t have someone goin’ around almost bein’ a wizard and laughin’ at us up his, his—what’s it that people laugh up?”

“My feelings exactly,” purred the Bursar.

“We should send him up,” said the Archchancellor firmly.

“Down, Master,” said the Bursar. “Sending him up would mean making spiteful and satirical comments about him.”

“Yes. Good thinkin’. Let’s do that,” said the Archchancellor.

“No, Master,” said the Bursar patiently. “He’s sending us up, so we send him down.”

“Right. Balance things up,” said the Archchancellor. The Bursar rolled his eyes. “Or down,” the Archchancellor added. “So you want me to give him his marchin’ orders, eh? Just send him along in the morning and—”

“No, Archchancellor. We can’t do it just like that.”

“We can’t? I thought we were in charge here!”

“Yes, but you have to be extremely careful when dealing with Master Tugelbend. He’s an expert on procedures. So what I thought we could do is give him this paper in the finals tomorrow.”

The Archchancellor took the proferred document. His lips moved silently as he read it.

“Just one question.”

“Yes. And he’ll either pass or fail. I’d like to see him manage 84 percent on that.”

 

In a sense which his tutors couldn’t quite define, much to their annoyance, Victor Tugelbend was also the laziest person in the history of the world.

Not simply, ordinarily lazy. Ordinary laziness was merely the absence of effort. Victor had passed through there a long time ago, had gone straight through commonplace idleness and out on the far side. He put more effort into avoiding work than most people put into hard labor.

He had never wanted to be a wizard. He’d never wanted much, except perhaps to be left alone and not woken up until midday. When he’d been small, people had said things like, “And what do you want to be, little man?” and he’d said, “I don’t know. What have you got?”

They didn’t let you get away with that sort of thing for very long. It wasn’t enough to be what you were, you had to be working to be something else.

He’d tried. For quite a long while he’d tried wanting to be a blacksmith, because that looked interesting and romantic. But it also involved hard work and intractable bits of metal. Then he’d tried wanting to be an assassin, which looked dashing and romantic. But it also involved hard work and, when you got right down to it, occasionally having to kill someone. Then he’d tried wanting to be an actor, which looked dramatic and romantic, but it had involved dusty tights, cramped lodgings and, to his amazement, hard work.

He’d allowed himself to be sent to the University because it was easier than not going.

He tended to smile a lot, in a faintly puzzled way. This gave people the impression that he was slightly more intelligent than they were. In fact, he was usually trying to work out what they had just said.

And he had a thin mustache, which in a certain light made him look debonair and, in another, made him look as though he had been drinking a thick chocolate milk shake.

He was quite proud of it. When you became a wizard you were expected to stop shaving and grow a beard like a gorse bush. Very senior wizards looked capable of straining nourishment out of the air via their mustaches, like whales.

It was now half-past one. He was ambling back from the Mended Drum, the most determinedly disreputable of the city’s taverns. Victor Tugelbend always gave the impression of ambling, even when he was running.

He was also quite sober and a bit surprised, therefore, to find himself in the Plaza of Broken Moons. He’d been heading for the little alley behind the University and the piece of wall with the conveniently-spaced removable bricks where, for hundreds and hundreds of years, student wizards had quietly got around, or more precisely climbed over, Unseen University’s curfew restrictions.

The plaza wasn’t on the route.

He turned to amble back the way he had come, and then stopped. There was something unusual going on.

Usually there’d be a storyteller there, or some musicians, or an entrepreneur looking for prospective buyers of such surplus Ankh-Morpork landmarks as the Tower of Art or the Brass Bridge.

Now there were just some people putting up a big screen, like a bedsheet stretched between poles.

He sauntered over to them. “What’re you doing?” he said amiably.

“There’s going to be a performance.”

“Oh. Acting,” said Victor, without much interest.

He mooched back through the damp darkness, but stopped when he heard a voice coming from the gloom between two buildings.

The voice said “Help,” quite quietly.

Another voice said, “Just hand it over, right?”

Victor wandered closer, and squinted into the shadows.

“Hallo?” he said. “Is everything all right?”

There was a pause, and then a low voice said, “You don’t know what’s good for you, kid.”

He’s got a knife, Victor thought. He’s coming at me with a knife. That means I’m either going to get stabbed or I’m going to have to run away, which is a real waste of energy.

People who didn’t apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically-inclined student in the University. Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab.

So he brought one hand around in a backhanded swipe. It didn’t just connect, it lifted the mugger off his feet.

Then he looked for the prospective victim, who was still cowering against the wall.

“I hope you’re not hurt,” he said.

“Don’t move!”

“I wasn’t going to,” said Victor.

The figure advanced from the shadows. It had a package under one arm, and its hands were held in front of its face in an odd gesture, each forefinger and thumb extended at right angles and then fitted together, so that the man’s little weaselly eyes appeared to be looking out through a frame.

He’s probably warding off the Evil Eye, Victor thought. He looks like a wizard, with all those symbols on his dress.

“Amazing!” said the man, squinting through his fingers.

“Just turn your head slightly, will you? Great! Pity about the nose, but I expect we can do something about that.”

He stepped forward and tried to put his arm around Victor’s shoulders. “It’s lucky for you,” he said, “that you met me.”

“It is?” said Victor, who had been thinking it was the other way around.

“You’re just the type I’m looking for,” said the man.

“Sorry,” said Victor. “I thought you were being robbed.”

“He was after this,” said the man, patting the package under his arm. It rang like a gong. “Wouldn’t have done him any good, though.”

“Not worth anything?” said Victor.

“Priceless.”

“That’s all right then,” said Victor.

The man gave up trying to reach across both of Victor’s shoulders, which were quite broad, and settled for just one of them.

“But a lot of people would be disappointed,” he said.

“Now, look. You stand well. Good profile. Listen, lad, how would you like to be in moving pictures?”

“Er,” said Victor. “No. I don’t think so.”

The man gaped at him.

“You did hear what I said, didn’t you?” he said. “Moving pictures?”

“Yes.”

“Everyone wants to be in moving pictures!”

“No, thanks,” said Victor, politely. “I’m sure it’s a worthwhile job, but moving pictures doesn’t sound very interesting to me.”

“I’m talking about moving pictures!”

“Yes,” said Victor mildly. “I heard you.”

The man shook his head. “Well,” he said, “you’ve made my day. First time in weeks I’ve met someone who isn’t desperate to get into moving pictures. I thought everyone wanted to get into moving pictures. I thought as soon as I saw you: he’ll be expecting a job in moving pictures for this night’s work.”

“Thanks all the same,” said Victor. “But I don’t think I’d take to it.”

“Well, I owe you something.” The little man fumbled in a pocket and produced a card. Victor took it. It read:

“That’s if ever you change your mind,” he said. “Everyone in Holy Wood knows me.”

Victor stared at the card. “Thank you,” he said vaguely. “Er. Are you a wizard?”

Silverfish glared at him.

“Whatever made you think that?” he snapped.

“You’re wearing a dress with magic symbols—”

“Magic symbols? Look closely, boy! These are certainly not the credulous symbols of a ridiculous and outmoded belief system! These are the badges of an enlightened craft whose clear, new dawn is just…er, dawning! Magic symbols!” he finished, in tones of withering scorn. “And it’s a robe, not a dress,” he added.

Victor peered at the collection of stars and crescent moons and things. The badges of an enlightened craft whose new dawn was just dawning looked just like the credulous symbols of a ridiculous and outmoded belief system to him, but this was probably not the time to say so.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Couldn’t see them clearly.”

“I’m an alchemist,” said Silverfish, only slightly mollified.

“Oh, lead into gold, that sort of thing,” said Victor.

“Not lead, lad. Light. It doesn’t work with lead. Light into gold…”

“Really?” said Victor politely, as Silverfish started to set up a tripod in the middle of the plaza.

A small crowd was collecting. A small crowd collected very easily in Ankh-Morpork. As a city, it had some of the most accomplished spectators in the universe. They’d watch anything, especially if there was any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way.

“Why don’t you stay for the show?” said Silverfish, and hurried off.

An alchemist. Well, everyone knew that alchemists were a little bit mad, thought Victor. It was perfectly normal.

Who’d want to spend their time moving pictures? Most of them looked all right where they were.

“Sausages inna bun! Get them while they’re hot!” bellowed a voice by his ear. He turned.

“Oh, hallo, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.

“Evening, lad. Want to get a nice hot sausage down you?”

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler’s neck. They smelled appetizing. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn’t know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

“Special rate for students,” Dibbler whispered conspiratorially. “Fifteen pence, and that’s cutting my own throat.” He flapped the frying pan lid strategically, raising a cloud of steam.

The piquant scent of fried onions did its wicked work.

“Just one, then,” Victor said warily.

Dibbler flicked a sausage out of the pan and snatched it into a bun with the expertise of a frog snapping a mayfly.

“You won’t live to regret it,” he said cheerfully,

Victor nibbled a bit of onion. That was safe enough.

“What’s all this?” he said, jerking a thumb in the direction of the flapping screen.

“Some kind of entertainment,” said Dibbler. “Hot sausages! They’re lovely!” He lowered his voice again to its normal conspiratorial hiss.

“All the rage in the other cities, I hear,” he added. “Some sort of moving pictures. They’ve been trying to get it right before coming to Ankh-Morpork.”

They watched Silverfish and a couple of associates fumble technically with the box on the tripod. White light suddenly appeared at a circular orifice on the front of it, and illuminated the screen. There was a half-hearted cheer from the crowd.

“Oh,” said Victor. “I see. Is that all? It’s just plain old shadow play. That’s all it is. My uncle used to do it to amuse me. You know? You kind of move your hands in front of the light and the shadows make a kind of silhouettey picture.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Dibbler uncertainly. “Like ‘Big Elephant,’ or ‘Bald Eagle.’ My grandad used to do that sort of stuff.”

“Mainly my uncle did ‘Deformed Rabbit,’” said Victor.

“He wasn’t very good at it, you see. It used to get pretty embarrassing. We’d all sit around desperately guessing things like ‘Surprised Hedgehog’ or ‘Rabid Stoat’ and he’d go off to bed in a sulk because we hadn’t guessed he was really doing ‘Lord Henry Skipps and His Men beating the Trolls at the Battle of Pseudopolis.’ I can’t see what’s so special about shadows on a screen.”

“From what I hear it’s not like that,” said Dibbler. “I sold one of the men a Jumbo Sausage Special earlier on, and he said it’s all down to showing pictures very fast. Sticking lots of pictures together and showing them one after another. Very, very fast, he said.”

“Not too fast,” said Victor severely. “You wouldn’t be able to see them go past if they were too fast.”

“He said that’s the whole secret, not seeing ’em go past,” said Dibbler. “You have to see ’em all at once, or something.”

“They’d all be blurred,” said Victor. “Didn’t you ask him about that?”

“Er, no,” said Dibbler. “Point of fact, he had to rush off just then. Said he felt a bit odd.”

Victor looked thoughtfully at the remnant of his sausage in a bun and, as he did so, he was aware of being stared at in his turn.

He looked down. There was a dog sitting by his feet.

It was small, bow-legged and wiry, and basically gray but with patches of brown, white and black in outlying areas, and it was staring.

It was certainly the most penetrating stare Victor had ever seen. It wasn’t menacing or fawning. It was just very slow and very thorough, as though the dog was memorizing details so that it could give a full description to the authorities later on.

When it was sure it had his full attention, it transferred its gaze to the sausage.

Feeling wretched at being so cruel to a poor dumb animal, Victor flicked the sausage downward. The dog caught and swallowed it in one economical movement.

More people were drifting into the plaza now. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler had wandered off and was doing a busy trade with those late-night revelers who were too drunk to prevent optimism triumphing over experience; anyone who bought a meal at one a.m. after a night’s reveling was probably going to be riotously ill anyway, so they might as well have something to show for it.

Victor was gradually surrounded by a large crowd. It didn’t consist solely of humans. He recognized, a few feet away, the big rangy shape of Detritus, an ancient troll well known to all the students as someone who found employment anywhere people needed to be thrown very hard out of places for money. The troll noticed him, and tried to wink. This involved closing both eyes, because Detritus wasn’t good at complicated things. It was widely believed that, if Detritus could be taught to read and write sufficiently to sit down and do an intelligence test, he’d prove to be slightly less intelligent than the chair.

Silverfish picked up a megaphone.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “you are privileged tonight to witness a turning point in the history of the Century of—” he lowered the megaphone and Victor heard him whisper urgently to one of his assistants, “What century is this? Is it?” and then raised the megaphone again and continued in the original plummily optimistic tones “—Century of the Fruitbat! No less than the birth of Moving Pictures! Pictures that move without magic!”

He waited for the applause. There wasn’t any. The crowd just watched him. You needed to do more than end your sentences with exclamation marks to get a around of applause from an Ankh-Morpork crowd.

Slightly dispirited, he went on, “Seeing is Believing, they say! But, ladies and gentlemen, you will not believe the Evidence of Your Own Eyes! What you are about to witness is a Triumph of Natural Science! A Marvel of the Age! A Discovery of World, nay, dare I say, Universe-Shaking Proportions!—”

“’S got to be better than that bloody sausage, anyway,” said a quiet voice by Victor’s knee.

“—Harnessing Natural Mechanisms to create Illusion! Illusion, Ladies and Gentlemen, without recourse to Magic!—”

Victor let his gaze slide downward. There was nothing down there but the little dog, industriously scratching itself. It looked up slowly, and said “Woof?”

“—Potential for Learning! The Arts! History! I thank you, Ladies and Gentlemen! Ladies and Gentlemen, You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!”

There was another hopeful break for applause.

Someone at the front of the crowd said, “That’s right. We ain’t.”

“Yeah,” said the woman next to him. “When’re you goin’ to stop goin’ on like that and get on with the shadow play?”

“That’s right,” snapped a second woman. “Do ‘Deformed Rabbit.’ My kids always love that one.”

Victor looked away for a while, to lull the dog’s suspicions, and then turned and glared hard at it.

It was amiably watching the crowd, and apparently taking no notice of him.

Victor poked an exploratory finger in his ear. It must have been a trick of an echo, or something. It wasn’t that the dog had gone “woof!,” although that was practically unique in itself; most dogs in the universe never went “woof!,” they had complicated barks like “whuuugh!” and “hwhoouf!” No, it was that it hadn’t in fact barked at all. It had said “woof.”

He shook his head, and looked back as Silverfish climbed down from the screen and motioned to one of his assistants to start turning a handle at the side of the box. There was a grinding noise that rose to a steady clicking. Vague shadows danced across the screen, and then…

One of the last things Victor remembered was a voice beside his knee saying, “Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said ‘miaow.’”

 

Holy Wood dreams…

 

And now it was now eight hours later.

A horribly overhung Ponder Stibbons looked guiltily at the empty desk beside him. It was unlike Victor to miss exams. He always said he enjoyed the challenge.

“Get ready to turn over your papers,” said the invigilator at the end of the hall. The sixty chests of sixty prospective wizards tightened with dark, unbearable tension. Ponder fumbled anxiously with his lucky pen.

The wizard on the dais turned over the hourglass. “You may begin,” he said.

Several of the more smug students turned over their papers by snapping their fingers. Ponder hated them instantly.

He reached for his lucky inkwell, missed completely in his nervousness, and then knocked it over. A small black flood rolled over his question paper.

Panic and shame washed over him nearly as thoroughly. He mopped the ink up with the hem of his robe, spreading it smoothly over the desk. His lucky dried frog had been washed away.

Hot with embarrassment, dripping black ink, he looked up in supplication at the presiding wizard and then cast his eyes imploringly at the empty desk beside him.

The wizard nodded. Ponder gratefully sidled across the aisle, waited until his heart had stopped thumping and then, very carefully, turned over the paper on the desk.

After ten seconds, and against all reason, he turned it over again just in case there had been a mistake and the rest of the questions had somehow been on the top side after all.

Around him there was the intense silence of fifty-nine minds creaking with sustained effort.

Ponder turned the paper over again.

Perhaps it was some mistake. No…there was the University seal and the signature of the Archchancellor and everything. So perhaps it was some sort of special test. Perhaps they were watching him now to see what he’d do…

He peered around furtively. The other students seemed to be working hard. Perhaps it was a mistake after all. Yes. The more he came to think about it, the more logical it seemed. The Archchancellor had probably signed the papers and then, when the clerks had been copying them out, one of them had got as far as the all-important first question and then maybe had been called away or something, and no one had noticed, and it’d got put on Victor’s desk, but now he wasn’t here and Ponder had got it which meant, he decided, in a sudden rush of piety, that the gods must have wanted him to get it. After all, it wasn’t his fault if some sort of error gave him a paper like this. It was probably sacrilegious or something to ignore the opportunity.

They had to accept what you put down. Ponder hadn’t shared the room with the world’s greatest authority on examination procedures without learning a thing or two.

He looked again at the question: “What is your name?”

He answered it.

After a while he underlined it, several times, with his lucky ruler.

After a little while longer, to show willing, he wrote above it: “The anser to questione One is:”

After a further ten minutes he ventured “Which is what my name is” on the line below, and underlined it.

Poor old Victor will be really sorry he missed this, he thought.

I wonder where he is?

 

There was no road to Holy Wood yet. Anyone trying to get there would take the highway to Quirm and, at some unmarked point out in the scrubby landscape, would turn off and strike out toward the sand dunes. Wild lavender and rosemary lined the banks. There was no sound but the buzzing of bees and the distant song of a skylark, which only made the silence more obvious.

Victor Tugelbend left the road at the point where the bank had been broken down and flattened by the passage of many carts and, by the look of it, an increasing number of feet.

There were still many miles to go. He trudged on.

Somewhere at the back of his mind a tiny voice was saying things like “Where am I? Why am I doing this?” and another part of him knew that he didn’t really have to do it at all. Like the hypnotist’s victim who knows they’re not really hypnotized and can snap out of it any time they like, but just happened not to feel like it right now, he let his feet be guided.

He wasn’t certain why. He just knew that there was something that he had to be part of. Something that might never happen again.

Some way behind, but catching up fast, was Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler, trying to ride a horse. He was not a natural horseman, and fell off occasionally, which was one reason why he hadn’t overtaken Victor yet. The other was that he had paused, before leaving the city, to sell his sausage-in-a-bun business cheaply to a dwarf who could not believe his luck (after actually trying some of the sausages, would still not be able to believe his luck).

Something was calling Dibbler, and it had a golden voice.

A long way behind Throat, knuckles dragging in the sand, was Detritus the troll. It’s hard to be certain of what he was thinking, any more than it’s possible to tell what a homing pigeon is thinking. He just knew that where he ought to be was not where he was.

And finally, even further down the road, was an eight-horse wagon taking a load of lumber to Holy Wood. Its driver wasn’t thinking about anything very much, although he was slightly puzzled by an incident that occurred just as he was leaving Ankh-Morpork in the darkness before dawn. A voice from the gloom by the road had shouted “Stop in the name of the city guard!” and he had stopped, and when nothing further had transpired he had looked around, and there was no one there.

The wagon rumbled past, revealing to the eye of the imaginative beholder the small figure of Gaspode the Wonder Dog, trying to make himself comfortable among the balks of timber at the rear. He was going to Holy Wood too.

And he also didn’t know why.

But he was determined to find out.

 

No one would have believed, in the final years of the Century of the Fruitbat, that Discworld affairs were being watched keenly and impatiently by intelligences greater than Man’s, or at least much nastier; that their affairs were being scrutinized and studied as a man with a three-day appetite might study the All-You-Can-Gobble-For-A-Dollar menu outside Harga’s House of Ribs…

Well, actually…most wizards would have believed it, if anyone had told them.

And the Librarian would certainly have believed it.

And Mrs. Marietta Cosmopilite of 3 Quirm Street, Ankh-Morpork, would have believed it, too. But she believed the world was round, that a sprig of garlic in her underwear drawer kept away vampires, that it did you good to get out and have a laugh occasionally, that there was niceness in everyone if you only knew where to look, and that three horrible little dwarfs peered in at her undressing every night. ⁴

 

Holy Wood!…

…was nothing very much, yet. Just a hill by the sea, and on the other side of the hill, a lot of sand dunes. It was that special sort of beautiful area which is only beautiful if you can leave after briefly admiring its beauty and go somewhere else where there are hot tubs and cold drinks. Actually staying there for any length of time is a penance.

Nevertheless, there was a town there…just. Wooden shacks had been built wherever someone had dropped a load of timber, and they were crude, as if the builders had resented the time taken from something more important that they’d much rather be doing. They were square plank boxes.

Except for the front.

If you wanted to understand Holy Wood, Victor said years afterward, you had to understand its buildings.

You’d see a box on the sand. It’s have a roughly peaked roof, but that wasn’t important, because it never rained in Holy Wood. There’d be cracks in the walls, stuffed with old rags. The windows would be holes—glass was too fragile to cart all the way from Ankh-Morpork. And, from behind, the front was just like a huge wooden billboard, held up by a network of struts.

From the front, it was a fretted, carved, painted, ornate, baroque architectural extravaganza. In Ankh-Morpork, sensible men built their houses plain, so as not to attract attention, and kept the decoration for inside. But Holy Wood wore its houses inside out.

Victor walked up what passed for the main street in a daze. He had woken up in the early hours out in the dunes. Why? He’d decided to come to Holy Wood, but why? He couldn’t remember. All he could remember was that, at the time, it was the obvious thing to do. There had been hundreds of good reasons.

If only he could remember one of them.

Not that his mind had any room to review memories. It was too busy being aware that he was very hungry and acutely thirsty. His pockets had yielded a total of seven pence. That wouldn’t buy a bowl of soup, let alone a good meal.

He needed a good meal. Things would look a lot clearer after a good meal.

He pushed through the crowds. Most of them seemed to be carpenters, but there were others, carrying carboys or mysterious boxes. And everyone was moving very quickly and resolutely, bent on some powerful purpose of their own.

Except him.

He trailed up the impromptu street, gawping at the houses, feeling like a stray grasshopper in an ant hill. And there didn’t seem to—

“Why don’t you look where you’re going!”

He rebounded off a wall. When he got his balance the other party in the collision had already whirred off into the crowd. He stared for a moment and then ran desperately after her.

“Hey!” he said, “Sorry! Excuse me? Miss?”

She stopped, and waited impatiently as he caught up.

“Well?” she said.

She was a foot shorter than him and her shape was doubtful since most of her was covered in a ridiculously frilly dress, although the dress wasn’t as ludicrous as the big blond wig full of ringlets. And her face was white with make-up apart from her eyes, which were heavily ringed in black. The general effect was of a lampshade that hadn’t been getting much sleep lately.

“Well?” she repeated, “Hurry up! They’re shooting again in five minutes!”

“Er—”

She unbent slightly. “No, don’t tell me,” she said. “You’ve just got here. It’s all new to you. You don’t know what to do. You’re hungry. You haven’t got any money. Right?”

“Yes! How did you know?”

“Everyone starts like that. And now you want to break into the clicks, right?”

“The clicks?”

She rolled her eyes, deep within their black circles.

“Moving pictures!”

“Oh—” I do, he thought. I didn’t know it but I do. Yes. That’s why I came here. Why didn’t I think of that? “Yes,” he said. “Yes, that’s what I want to do. I want to, er, break in. And how does one do that?”

“One waits forever and ever. Until one is noticed.” The girl looked him up and down with unconcealed contempt.

“Take up carpentry, why don’t you? Holy Wood always needs good wood butchers.”

And then she spun around and was gone, lost in a crowd of busy people.

“Er, thank you,” Victor called after her. “Thank you.” He raised his voice and added, “I hope your eyes get better!”

He jingled the coins in his pocket.

Well, carpentry was out. It sounded too much like hard work. He’d tried it once, and wood and him had soon reached an agreement—he wouldn’t touch it, and it wouldn’t split.

Waiting forever and ever had its attractions, but you needed money to do it with.

His fingers closed around a small, unexpected rectangle. He pulled it out and looked at it.

Silverfish’s card.

 

No. 1 Holy Wood turned out to be a couple of shacks inside a high fence. There was a queue at the gate. It was made up of trolls, dwarfs and humans. They looked as though they had been there for some time; in fact, some of them had such a naturally dispirited way of sagging while remaining upright that they might have been specially-evolved descendants of the original prehistoric queuers.

At the gate was a large, heavy-set man, who was eyeing the queue with the smug look of minor power-wielders everywhere.

“Excuse me—” Victor began.

“Mister Silverfish ain’t hiring anymore people this morning,” said the man out of the corner of his mouth. “So scram.”

“But he said that if ever I was in—”

“Did I just say scram, friend?”

“Yes, but—”

The door in the fence opened a fraction. A small pale face poked out.

“We need a troll and a coupla humans,” it said. “One day, usual rates.” The gate shut again.

The man straightened up and cupped his scarred hands around his mouth.

“Right, you horrible lot!” he shouted. “You heard the man!” He ran his eyes over the line with the practiced gaze of a stock breeder. “You, you and you,” he said, pointing.

“Excuse me,” said Victor helpfully, “but I think that man over there was actually first in the—”

He was shoved out of the way. The lucky three shuffled in. He thought he saw the glint of coins changing hands. Then the gatekeeper turned an angry red face toward him.

“You,” he said, “get to the end of the queue. And stay there!”

Victor stared at him. He stared at the gate. He looked at the long line of dispirited people.

“Um, no,” he said. “I don’t think so. Thanks all the same.”

“Then beat it!”

Victor gave him a friendly smile. He walked to the end of the fence, and followed it. It turned, at the far end, into a narrow alley.

Victor searched among the usual alley debris for a while until he found a piece of scrap paper. Then he rolled up his sleeves. And only then did he inspect the fence carefully until he found a couple of loose boards that, with a bit of effort, let him through.

This brought him into an area stacked with lumber and piles of cloth. There was no one around.

Walking purposefully, in the knowledge that no one with their sleeves rolled up who walks purposefully with a piece of paper held conspicuously in their hand is ever challenged, he set out across the wood and canvas wonderland of Interesting and Instructive Kinematography.

There were buildings painted on the back of other buildings. There were trees that were trees, at the front, and just a mass of struts at the back. There was a flurry of activity although, as far as Victor could see, no one was actually producing anything.

He watched a man in a long black cloak, a black hat and a mustache like a yard brush tie a girl to one of the trees. No one seemed interested in stopping him, even though she was struggling. A couple of people were in fact watching disinterestedly, and there was a man standing behind a large box on a tripod, turning a handle.

She flung out an imploring arm and opened and shut her mouth soundlessly.

One of the watchers stood up, sorted through a stack of boards beside him, and held one up in front of the box.

It was black. On it, in white, were the words “Noe! Noe!”

He walked away. The villain twirled his mustache. The man walked back with a board. This time it said “Ahar! My proude beauty!”

Another of the seated watchers picked up a megaphone.

“Fine, fine,” he said. “OK, take a five minutes break and then everyone back here for the big fight scene.”

The villain untied the girl. They wandered off. The man stopped turning the handle, lit a cigarette, and then opened the top of the box.

“Everyone get that?” he said.

There was a chorus of squeaks.

Victor walked over and tapped the megaphone man on his shoulder.

“Urgent message for Mr. Silverfish?” he said.

“He’s in the offices over there,” said the man, jerking his thumb over his shoulder without looking around.

“Thank you.”

The first shed he poked his head into contained nothing but rows of small cages stretching away into the gloom. Indistinct things hurled themselves against the bars and chittered at him. He slammed the door hurriedly.

The next door revealed Silverfish, standing in front of a desk covered with bits of glassware and drifts of paper. He didn’t turn around.

“Just put it over there,” he said absently.

“It’s me, Mr. Silverfish,” said Victor.

Silverfish turned around and peered vaguely at him, as if it was Victor’s fault that his name meant nothing.

“Yes?”

“I’ve come because of that job,” said Victor. “You know?”

“What job? What should I know?” said Silverfish. “How the hell did you get in here?”

“I broke into moving pictures,” said Victor. “But it’s nothing that a hammer and a few nails won’t put right.”

Panic bloomed on Silverfish’s face. Victor pulled out the card and waved it in what he hoped was a reassuring way.

“In Ankh-Morpork?” he said. “A couple of nights ago? You were being menaced?”

Realization dawned. “Oh, yes,” said Silverfish faintly. “And you were the lad who was of some help.”

“And you said to come and see you if I wanted to move pictures,” said Victor. “I didn’t, then, but I do now.” He gave Silverfish a bright smile.

But he thought: he’s going to try and wriggle out of it. He’s regretting the offer. He’s going to send me back to the queue.

“Well, of course,” said Silverfish, “a lot of very talented people want to be in moving pictures. We’re going to have sound any day now. I mean, are you a carpenter? Any alchemical experience? Have you ever trained imps? Any good with your hands at all?”

“No,” Victor admitted.

“Can you sing?”

“A bit. In the bath. But not very well,” Victor conceded.

“Can you dance?”

“No.”

“Swords? Do you know how to handle a sword?”

“A little,” said Victor. He’d used one sometimes in the gym. He’d never in fact fought an opponent, since wizards generally abhor exercise and the only other University resident who ever entered the place was the Librarian, and then only to use the ropes and rings. But Victor had practiced an energetic and idiosyncratic technique in front of the mirror, and the mirror had never beaten him yet.

“I see,” said Silverfish gloomily. “Can’t sing. Can’t dance. Can handle a sword a little.”

“But I have saved your life twice,” said Victor.

“Twice?” snapped Silverfish.

“Yes,” said Victor. He took a deep breath. This was going to be risky. “Then,” he said, “and now.”

There was a long pause.

Then Silverfish said, “I really don’t think there’s any call for that.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Silverfish,” Victor pleaded. “I’m really not that kind of person but you did say and I’ve walked all this way and I haven’t got any money and I’m hungry and I’ll do anything you’ve got. Anything at all. Please.”

Silverfish looked at him doubtfully.

“Even acting?” he said.

“Pardon?”

“Moving about and pretending to do things,” said Silverfish helpfully.

“Yes!”

“Seems a shame, a bright, well-educated lad like you,” said Silverfish. “What do you do?”

“I’m studying to be a w—,” Victor began. He remembered Silverfish’s antipathy toward wizardry, and corrected himself, “a clerk.”

“A waclerk?” said Silverfish.

“I don’t know if I’d be any good at acting, though,” Victor confessed.

Silverfish looked surprised. “Oh, you’ll be OK,” he said. “It’s very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures.”

He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out a dollar coin.

“Here,” he said, “go and get something to eat.”

He looked Victor up and down.

“Are you waiting for something?” he said.

“Well,” said Victor, “I was hoping you could tell me what’s going on.”

“How do you mean?”

“A couple of nights ago I watched your, your click,” he felt slightly proud of remembering the term, “back in the city and suddenly I wanted to be here more than anything else. I’ve never really wanted anything in my life before!”

Silverfish’s face broke into a relieved grin.

“Oh, that,” he said. “That’s just the magic of Holy Wood. Not wizard’s magic,” he added hastily, “which is all superstition and mumbo-jumbo. No. This is magic for ordinary people. Your mind is fizzing with all the possibilities. I know mine was,” he added.

“Yes,” said Victor uncertainly. “But how does it work?”

Silverfish’s face lit up.

“You want to know?” he said. “You want to know how things work?”

“Yes, I—”

“You see, most people are so disappointing,” Silverfish said. “You show them something really wonderful like the picture box, and they just go ‘oh.’ They never ask how it works. Mr. Bird!”

The last word was a shout. After a while a door opened on the far side of the shack and a man appeared.

He had a picture box on a strap around his neck. Assorted tools hung from his belt. His hands were stained with chemical and he had no eyebrows, which Victor was later to learn was a sure sign of someone who had been around octo-cellulose for any length of time. He also had his cap on back to front.

“This is Gaffer Bird,” beamed Silverfish. “Our head handleman. Gaffer, this is Victor. He’s going to act for us.”

“Oh,” said Gaffer, looking at Victor in the same way that a butcher might look at a carcass. “Is he?”

“And he wants to know how things work!” said Silverfish.

Gaffer gave Victor another jaundiced look.

“String,” he said gloomily. “It all works by string. You’d be amazed how things’d fall to bits around here,” he said, “if it weren’t for me and my ball of string.”

There was a sudden commotion from the box around his neck. He thumped it with the flat of his hand.

“You lot can cut that out,” he said. He nodded at Victor.

“They gets fractious if their routine is upset,” he said.

“What’s in the box?” said Victor.

Gaffer winked at Silverfish. “I bet you’d like to know,” he said.

Victor remembered the caged things he’d seen in the shed.

“They sound like common demons,” he said cautiously.

Gaffer gave him an approving look, such as might be given to a stupid dog who had just done a rather clever trick.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he conceded.

“But how do you stop them escaping?” said Victor.

Gaffer leered. “Amazin’ stuff, string,” he said.

 

Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was one of those rare people with the ability to think in straight lines.

Most people think in curves and zig-zags. For example, they start from a thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what’s for supper, and: I wonder who I know who can lend me five dollars?

Whereas Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell.

But his life savings were now resting in a leather bag inside his jerkin. He’d been in Holy Wood for a day. He’d looked at its ramshackle organization, such as it was, with the eye of a lifelong salesman. There seemed nowhere in it for him, but this wasn’t a problem. There was always room at the top.

A day’s enquiries and careful observation had led him to Interesting and Instructive Kinematography. Now he stood on the far side of the street, watching carefully.

He watched the queue. He watched the man on the gate. He reached a decision.

He strolled along the queue. He had brains. He knew he had brains. What he needed now was muscle. Somewhere here there was bound to—

“Aft’noon, Mister Dibbler.”

That flat head, those rangy arms, that curling lower lip, that croaking voice that bespoke an IQ the size of a walnut. It added up to—

“It’s me. Detritus,” said Detritus. “Fancy seein’ you here, eh?”

He gave Dibbler a grin like a crack appearing in a vital bridge support.

“Hallo, Detritus. You working in films?” said Dibbler.

“Not exactly working,” said Detritus, bashfully.

Dibbler looked quietly at the troll, whose chipped fists were generally the final word in any street fight.

“I call that disgusting,” he said. He pulled out his money bag and counted out five dollars. “How would you like to work for me, Detritus?”

Detritus touched his jutting brow respectfully.

“Right you are, Mr. Dibbler,” he said.

“Just step this way.”

Dibbler strolled back up to the head of the queue. The man at the door thrust out an arm to bar his way.

“Where d’you think you’re going, pal?” he said.

“I have an appointment with Mr. Silverfish,” said Dibbler.

“And he knows about this, does he?” said the guard, in tones that suggested that he personally would not believe it even if he saw it written on the sky.

“Not yet,” said Dibbler.

“Well, my friend, in that case you can just get yourself to—”

“Detritus?”

“Yes, Mr. Dibbler?”

“Hit this man.”

“Right you are, Mr. Dibbler.”

Detritus’s arm whirled around in a 180 degree arc with oblivion on the end of it. The guard was lifted off his feet and smashed through the door, coming to a stop in its wreckage twenty feet away. There was a cheer from the queue.

Dibbler looked approvingly at the troll. Detritus was wearing nothing except a ragged loincloth which covered whatever it was that trolls felt it necessary to conceal.

“Very good, Detritus.”

“Right you are, Mr. Dibbler.”

“But we shall have to see about getting you a suit,” said Dibbler. “Now, please guard the gate. Don’t let anyone in.”

“Right you are, Mr. Dibbler.”

Two minutes later a small gray dog trotted through the troll’s short and bandy legs and hopped over the remains of the gate, but Detritus didn’t do anything about this because everyone knew dogs weren’t anyone.

 

“Mr. Silverfish?” said Dibbler.

Silverfish, who had been cautiously crossing the studio with a box of fresh film stock, hesitated at the sight of a skinny figure bearing down on him like a long-lost weasel. Dibbler’s expression was the expression worn by something long and sleek and white as it swims over the reef and into the warm shallow waters of the kiddies’ paddling area.

“Yes?” said Silverfish. “Who’re you? How did you get—”

“Dibbler’s the name,” said Dibbler. “But I’d like you to call me Throat.”

He clasped Silverfish’s unresisting hand and then placed his other hand on the man’s shoulder and stepped forward, pumping the first hand vigorously. The effect was of acute affability, and it meant that if Silverfish backed away he would dislocate his own elbow.

“And I’d just like you to know,” Dibbler went on, “that we’re all incredibly impressed at what you boys are doing here.”

Silverfish watched his own hand being strenuously made friends with, and grinned uncertainly.

“You are?” he ventured.

“All this—,” Dibbler released Silverfish’s shoulder just long enough to expansively indicate the energetic chaos around them. “Fantastic!” he said. “Marvellous! And that last thing of yours, what was it called now—?”

“High Jinks at the Store,” said Silverfish. “That’s the one where the thief steals the sausages and the shop-keeper chases him?”

“Yeah,” said Dibbler, his fixed smile glazing for only a second or two before becoming truly sincere again. “Yeah. That was it. Amazing! True genius! A beautifully sustained metaphor!”

“That cost us nearly twenty dollars, you know,” said Silverfish, with shy pride. “And another forty pence for the sausages, of course.”

“Amazing!” said Dibbler. “And it must have been seen by hundreds of people, yes?”

“Thousands,” said Silverfish.

There was no analogy for Dibbler’s grin now. If it had managed to be any wider, the top of his head would have fallen off.

“Thousands?” he said. “Really? That many? And of course they all pay you, oh, how much—?”

“Oh, we just take up a collection at the moment,” said Silverfish. “Just to cover costs while we’re still in the experimental stage, you understand.” He looked down. “I wonder,” he added, “could you stop shaking my hand now?”

Dibbler followed his gaze. “Of course!” he said, and let go. Silverfish’s hand carried on going up and down for a while of its own accord, out of sheer muscular spasm.

Dibbler was silent for a moment, his expression that of a man in deep communion with some inner god. Then he said, “You know, Thomas—may I call you Thomas?—when I saw that masterpiece I thought, Dibbler, behind all this is a creative artist—”

“—how did you know my name was—”

“—a creative artist, I thought, who should be free to pursue his muse instead of being burdened with all the fussy details of management, am I right?”

“Well…it’s true that all this paperwork is a bit—”

“My thoughts exactly,” said Dibbler, “and I said, Dibbler, you should go there right now and offer him your services. You know. Administrate. Take the load off his shoulders. Let him get on with what he does best, am I right? Tom?”

“I, I, I, yes, of course, it’s true that my forte is really more in—”

“Right! Right!” said Dibbler. “Tom, I accept!”

Silverfish’s eyes were glassy.

“Er,” he said.

Dibbler punched him playfully on the shoulder. “Just you show me the paperwork,” he said, “and then you can get right out there and do whatever it is you do so well.”

“Er. Yes,” said Silverfish.

Dibbler grasped him by both arms and gave him a thousand watts of integrity.

“This is a proud moment for me,” he said hoarsely. “I can’t tell you how much this means to me. I can honestly say this is the happiest day of my life. I want you to know that. Tommy. Sincerely.”

The reverential silence was broken by a faint sniggering.

Dibbler looked around slowly. There was no one behind them apart from a small gray mongrel dog sitting in the shade of a heap of lumber. It noticed his expression and put its head on one side.

“Woof?” it said.

Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler looked around momentarily for something to throw, realized that this would be out of character, and turned back to the imprisoned Silverfish.

“You know,” he said sincerely, “it’s really lucky for me that I met you.”

 

Lunch in a tavern had cost Victor the dollar plus a couple of pence. It was a bowl of soup. Everything cost a lot, said the soup-seller, because it all had to be brought a long way. There weren’t any farms around Holy Wood. Anyway, who’d grow things when they could be making movies?

Then he reported to Gaffer for his screen test.

This consisted of standing still for a minute while the handleman watched him owlishly over the top of a picture box. After the minute had passed Gaffer said, “Right. You’re a natural, kid.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” said Victor. “You just told me not to move.”

“Yeah. Quite right. That’s what we need. People who know how to stand still,” said Gaffer. “None of this fancy acting like in the theater.”

“But you haven’t told me what the demons do in the box,” said Victor.

“They do this,” said Gaffer, unclicking a couple of latches. A row of tiny malevolent eyes glared out at Victor.

“These six demons here,” he said, pointing cautiously to avoid the claws, “look out through the little hole in the front of the box and paint pictures of what they see. There has to be six of them, OK? Two to paint and four to blow on it to get it dry. On account of the next picture coming down, see. That’s because every time this handle here is turned, the strip of transparent membrane is wound down one notch for the next picture.” He turned the handle. It went clickaclicka, and the imps gibbered.

“What did they do that for?” said Victor.

“Ah,” said Gaffer, “that’s because the handle also drives this little wheel with whips on. It’s the only way to get them to work fast enough. He’s a lazy little devil, your average imp. It’s all feedback, anyway. The faster you turn the handle, the faster the film goes by, the faster they have to paint. You got to get the speed just right. Very important job, handlemanning.”

“But isn’t it all rather, well, cruel?”

Gaffer looked surprised. “Oh, no. Not really. I gets a rest every half an hour. Guild of Handlemen regulations.”

He walked further along the bench, where another box stood with its back panel open. This time a cageful of sluggish-looking lizards blinked mournfully at Victor.

“We ain’t very happy with this,” said Gaffer, “but it’s the best we can do. Your basic salamander, see, will lie in the desert all day, absorbing light, and when it’s frightened it excretes the light again. Self-defense mechanism, it’s called. So as the film goes past and the shutter here clicks backward and forward, their light goes out through the film and these lenses here and onto the screen. Basically very simple.”

“How do you make them frightened?” said Victor.

“You see this handle?”

“Oh.”

Victor prodded the picture box thoughtfully.

“Well, all right,” he said. “So you get lots of little pictures. And you wind them fast. So we ought to see a blur, but we don’t.”

“Ah,” said Gaffer, tapping the side of his nose. “Handlemen’s Guild secret, that is. Handed down from initiate to initiate,” he added importantly.

Victor gave him a sharp look. “I thought people’d only been making movies for a few months,” he said.

Gaffer had the decency to look shifty. “Well, OK, at the moment we’re more sort of handing it round,” he admitted. “But give us a few years and we’ll soon be handing it down don’t touch that!”

Victor jerked his hand back guiltily from the pile of cans on the bench.

“That’s actual film in there,” said Gaffer, pushing them gently to one side. “You got to be very careful with it. You mustn’t get it too hot because it’s made of octo-cellulose, and it don’t like sharp knocks either.”

“What happens to it, then?” said Victor, staring at the cans.

“Who knows? No one’s ever lived long enough to tell us.” Gaffer looked at Victor’s expression and grinned.

“Don’t worry about that,” he said. “You’ll be in front of the moving-picture box.”

“Except that I don’t know how to act,” said Victor.

“Do you know how to do what you’re told?” said Gaffer.

“What? Well. Yes. I suppose so.”

“That’s all you need, lad. That’s all you need. That and big muscles.”

They stepped out into the searing sunlight and headed for Silverfish’s shed.

Which was occupied.

Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was meeting the movies.

 

“What I thought,” said Dibbler, “is that, well, look. Something like this.”

He held up a card.

On it was written, in shaky handwriting:

 

After thys perfromans, Why Notte Visit
Harga’s Hous of Ribs,
For the Best inne Hawt Cuisyne

 

“What’s hawt cuisyne?” said Victor.

“It’s foreign,” said Dibbler. He scowled at Victor. Someone like Victor under the same roof wasn’t part of the plan. He’d been hoping to get Silverfish alone. “Means food,” he added.

Silverfish stared at the card.

“What about it?” he said.

“Why don’t you,” said Dibbler, speaking very carefully, “hold this card up at the end of the performance?”

“Why should we do that?”

“Because someone like Sham Harga will pay you a lo—quite a lot of money,” said Dibbler.

They stared at the card.

“I’ve eaten at Harga’s House of Ribs,” said Victor. “I wouldn’t say it’s the best. Not the best. A long way from being the best.” He thought for a bit. “About as far away from being the best as you can get, in fact.”

“That doesn’t matter,” said Dibbler sharply. “That’s not important.”

“But,” Silverfish said, “if we went around saying Harga’s House of Ribs was the best place in the city, what would all the other restaurants think?”

Dibbler leaned across the table.

“They’d think,” he said, “‘Why didn’t we think of it first?’”

He sat back. Silverfish flashed him a look of bright incomprehension.

“Just run that past me one more time, will you?” he said.

“They’ll want to do exactly the same thing!” said Dibbler.

“I know,” said Victor. “They’ll want us to hold up cards with things on like ‘Harga’s Isn’t the Best Place in Town, Actually, Ours Is.’”

“Something like that, something like that,” snapped Dibbler, glaring at him. “Maybe we can work on the words, but something like that.”

“But, but,” Silverfish fought to keep ahead of the conversation, “Harga won’t like it, will he? If he pays us money to say his place is best, and then we take money from other people to say that their place is best, then he’s bound to—”

“Pay us more money,” said Dibbler, “to say it again, only in larger letters.”

They stared at him.

“You really think that will work?” said Silverfish.

“Yes,” said Dibbler flatly. “You listen to the street traders any morning. They don’t shout, ‘Nearly-fresh oranges, only slightly squashy, reasonable value,’ do they? No, they shout, ‘Git chore orinjes, they’re luvverly.’ Good business sense.”

He leaned across the desk again.

“Seems to me,” he said, “that you could do with some of that around here.”

“So it appears,” said Silverfish weakly.

“And with the money,” said Dibbler, his voice a crowbar inserted in the cracks in reality, “you could really get on with perfecting your art.”

Silverfish brightened a bit. “That’s true,” he said. “For example, some way of getting sound on—”

Dibbler wasn’t listening. He pointed to a stack of boards leaning against the wall.

“What are those?” he said.

“Ah,” said Silverfish. “That was my idea. We thought it would be, er, good business sense,” he savored the words as if they were some rare new sweet, “to tell people about the other moving pictures we were making.”

Dibbler picked up one of the boards and held it critically at arm’s length.

It said:

 

Nexte weke wee will be Shewing
Pelias and Melisande,
A Romantick Tragedie in Two Reels.
Thank you.

 

“Oh,” he said, flatly.

“Isn’t that all right?” said Silverfish, now thoroughly beaten. “I mean, it tells them everything they should know, doesn’t it?”

“May I?” said Dibbler, taking a piece of chalk from Silverfish’s desk. He scribbled intently on the back of the card for a while, and then turned it around.

Now it read:

 

Goddes and Men Saide It Was Notte To Bee,
But They Would Notte Listen!
Pelias and Melisande, A Storie of Forbiden Love!
A searing Sarger of Passion that Bridged Spaes and Tyme!
Thys wille shok you!
With a 1,000 elephants!

 

Victor and Silverfish read it carefully, as one reads a dinner menu in an alien language. This was an alien language, and to make it worse it was also their own.

“Well, well,” said Silverfish. “My word…I don’t know if there was anything actually forbidden. Er. It was just very historical. I thought it would help, you know, children and so on. Learn about history. They never actually met, you know, which was what was so tragic. It was all very, er, sad.” He stared at the card. “Though I must say, you’ve certainly got something there. Er.” He looked uncomfortable about something. “I don’t actually remember any elephants,” he said, as if it was his own fault. “I was there the whole afternoon we made it, and I don’t recall a thousand elephants at any point. I’m sure I would have noticed.”

Dibbler stared. He didn’t know where they were coming from, but now he was putting his mind to it he was getting some very clear ideas about what you needed to put in movies. A thousand elephants was a good start.

“No elephants?” he said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, are there any dancing girls?”

“Um, no.”

“Well, are there any wild chases and people hanging by their fingertips from the edge of a cliff?”

Silverfish brightened up slightly. “I think there’s a balcony at one point,” he said.

“Yes? Does anyone hang on it by their fingertips?”

“I don’t think so,” said Silverfish. “I believe Melisande leans over it.”

“Yes, but will the audience hold their breath in case she falls off?”

“I hope they’d be watching Pelias’ speech,” said Silverfish testily. “We had to put it on five cards. In small writing.”

Dibbler sighed.

“I think I know what people want,” he said, “and they don’t want to read lots of small writing. They want spectacles!”

“Because of the small writing?” said Victor, sarcastically.

“They want dancing girls! They want thrills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!”

“What, you mean like dwarfs and gnomes and so on?” said Victor.

“No!”

“Tell me, Mr. Dibbler,” said Silverfish, “what exactly is your profession?”

“I sell merchandise,” said Dibbler.

“Mostly sausages,” Victor volunteered.

“And merchandise,” said Dibbler, sharply. “I only sells sausages when the merchandising trade is a bit slow.”

“And the sale of sausages leads you to believe you can make better moving pictures?” said Silverfish. “Anyone can sell sausages! Isn’t that so, Victor?”

“Well…” said Victor, reluctantly. No one except Dibbler could possibly sell Dibbler’s sausages.

“There you are, then,” said Silverfish.

“The thing is,” said Victor, “that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people that have bought them off him before.”

“That’s right!” said Dibbler. He beamed at Victor.

“And a man who could sell Mr. Dibbler’s sausages twice could sell anything,” said Victor.

 

The next morning was bright and clear, like all Holy Wood days, and they made a start on The Interestinge and Curious Adventures of Cohen the Barbarian. Dibbler had worked on it all evening, he said.

The title, however, was Silverfish’s. Although Dibbler had assured him that Cohen the Barbarian was practically historical and certainly educational, Silverfish had held out against Valley of Blud!

Victor was handed what looked like a leather purse but which turned out to be his costume. He changed behind a couple of rocks.

He was also given a large, blunt sword.

“Now,” said Dibbler, who was sitting in a canvas chair, “what you do is, you fight the trolls, rush up and untie the girl from the stake, fight the other trolls, and then run off behind that other rock over there. That’s the way I see it. What do you say, Tommy?”

“Well, I—” Silverfish began.

“That’s great,” said Dibbler. “OK. Yes, Victor?”

“You mentioned trolls. What trolls?” said Victor.

The two rocks unfolded themselves.

“Don’t you worry about a fing, mister,” said the nearest one. “Me and ole Galena over there have got this down pat.”

“Trolls!” said Victor, backing away.

“That’s right,” said Galena. He flourished a club with a nail in it.

“But, but,” Victor began.

“Yeah?” said the other troll.

What Victor would like to have said was: but you’re trolls, fierce animated rocks that live in the mountains and bash travelers with huge clubs very similar to the ones you’re holding now, and I thought when they said trolls they meant ordinary men dressed up in, oh, I don’t know, sacking painted gray or something.

“Oh, good,” he said weakly. “Er.”

“And don’t you go listening to them stories about us eatin’ people,” said Galena. “That’s a slander, that is. I mean, we’re made of rock, what’d we want to eat people—”

“Swaller,” said the other troll. “You mean swaller.”

“Yeah. What’s we want to swaller people for? We always spit out the bits. And anyway we’re retired from all that now,” he added quickly. “Not that we ever did it.” He nudged Victor in a friendly fashion, nearly breaking one of his ribs.

“It’s good here,” he said conspiratorially. “We get three dollars a day plus a dollar barrier cream allowance for daylight working.”

“On account of turning to stone until nightfall otherwise, what is a pain,” said his companion.

“Yeah, an’ it holds up shooting and people strike matches on you.”

“Plus our contract says we get five pence extra for use of own club,” said the other troll.

“If we could just get started—” Silverfish began.

“Why’s there only two trolls?” complained Dibbler. “What’s heroic about fighting two trolls? I asked for twenty, didn’t I?”

“Two’s fine by me,” Victor called out.

“Listen, Mr. Dibbler,” said Silverfish, “I know you’re trying to help, but the basic economics—”

Silverfish and Dibbler started to argue. Gaffer the handleman sighed and took the back off the moving-picture-box to feed and water the demons, who were complaining.

Victor leaned on his sword.

“Do a lot of this sort of thing, do you?” he said to the trolls.

“Yeah,” said Galena. “All the time. Like, in A King’s Ransom, I play a troll who rushed out an’ hit people. An’ in The Dark Forest, I play a troll who rushed out an’ hit people. An’, an’, in Mystery Mountain I play a troll who rushed out, an’ jumped up an’ down on people. It doesn’t pay to get type-cast.”

“And do you do the same thing?” said Victor, to the other troll.

“Oh, Morraine’s a character actor, ain’t you?” said Galena. “Best in the business.”

“What does he play?”

“Rocks.”

Victor stared.

“On account of his craggy features,” Galena went on.

“Not just rocks. You should see him do an ancient monolith. You’d be amazed. Go on, Morry, show ’im yer inscription.”

“Nah,” said Morraine, grinning sheepishly.

“I’m thinking of changing my name for movin’ pictures,” Galena went on. “Somethin’ with a bit o’ class. I thought ‘Flint.’” He gave Victor a worried look, insofar as Victor was any judge of the range of expressions available to a face that looked as though it had been kicked out of granite with a pair of steel-toed boots. “What you fink?” he said.

“Er. Very nice.”

“More dynamic, I fought,” said the prospective Flint.

Victor heard himself say: “Or Rock. Rock’s a nice name.”

The troll stared at him, its lips moving soundlessly as it tried out the alias.

“Cor,” he said. “Never fought of that. Rock. I like that. I reckon I’d be due more’n three dollars a day, with a name like Rock.”

“Can we make a start?” said Dibbler sternly. “Maybe we’ll be able to afford more trolls if this is a successful click, but it won’t be if we go over budget, which means we ought to wrap it up by lunchtime. Now, Morry and Galena—”

“Rock,” corrected Rock.

“Really? Anyway, you two rush out and attack Victor, OK. Right…turn it…”

The handleman turned the handle of the picture box. There was a faint clicking noise and a chorus of small yelps from the demons. Victor stood looking helpful and alert.

“That means you start,” said Silverfish patiently. “The trolls rush out from behind the rocks, and you valiantly defend yourself.”

“But I don’t know how to fight trolls!” Victor wailed.

“Tell you what,” said the newly-christened Rock. “You parry first, and we’ll sort of arrange not to hit you.”

Light dawned.

“You mean it’s all pretending?” said Victor.

The trolls exchanged a brief glance, which nevertheless contrived to say: amazing, isn’t it, that things like this apparently rule the world?

“Yeah,” said Rock. “That’s it. Nuffin’s real.”

“We ain’t allowed to kill you,” said Morraine reassuringly.

“That’s right,” said Rock. “We wouldn’t go round killin’ you.”

“They stops our money if we does things like that,” said Morraine, morosely.

 

Outside the fault in reality They clustered, peering in with something approaching eyes at the light and warmth. There was a crowd of them by now.

There had been a way through, once. To say that they remembered it would be wrong, because they had nothing as sophisticated as memory. They barely had anything as sophisticated as heads. But they did have instincts and emotions.

They needed a way in.

They found it.

 

It worked quite well, the sixth time. The main problem was the trolls’ enthusiasm for hitting each other, the ground, the air and, quite often, themselves. In the end, Victor just concentrated on trying to hit the clubs as they whirred past him.

Dibbler seemed quite happy with this. Gaffer wasn’t.

“They moved around too much,” he said. “They were out of the picture half the time.”

“It was a battle,” said Silverfish.

“Yeah, but I can’t move the picture box around,” said the handleman. “The imps fall over.”

“Couldn’t you strap them in or something?” said Dibbler.

Gaffer scratched his chin. “I suppose I could nail their feet to the floor,” he said.

“Anyway, it’ll do for now,” said Silverfish. “We’ll do the scene where you rescue the girl. Where’s the girl? I distinctly instructed her to be here. Why isn’t she here? Why doesn’t anyone ever do what I tell them?”

The handleman took his cigarette stub out of his mouth.

“She’s filmin’ A Bolde Adventurer over the other side of the hill,” he volunteered.

“But that ought to have been finished yesterday!” wailed Silverfish.

“Film exploded,” said the handleman.

“Blast! Well, I suppose we can do the next fight. She doesn’t have to be in it,” said Silverfish grumpily. “All right, everybody. We’ll do the bit where Victor fights the dreaded Balgrog.”

“What’s a Balgrog?” said Victor.

A friendly but heavy hand tapped him on the shoulder.

“It’s a traditional evil monster what is basically Morry painted green with wings stuck on,” said Rock. “I’ll jus’ go an’ help him with the paintin’.”

He lumbered off.

No one seemed to want Victor at the moment.

He stuck the ridiculous sword into the sand, wandered away and found a bit of shade under some scrubby olive trees. There were rocks here. He tapped them gently. They didn’t appear to be anyone.

The ground formed a cool little hollow that was almost pleasant by the seared standards of Holy Wood hill.

There was even a draft blowing from somewhere. As he leaned back against the stones he felt a cool breeze coming from them. Must be full of caves under here, he thought.

—far away in Unseen University, in a drafty, many pillar’d corridor, a little device that no one had paid much attention to for years started to make a noise—

So this was Holy Wood. It hadn’t looked like this on the silver screen. It seemed that moving pictures involved a lot of waiting around and, if he was hearing things right, a mixing-up of time. Things happened before the things they happened after. The monsters were just Morry painted green with wings stuck on. Nothing was really real.

Funnily enough, that was exciting.

“I’ve just about had enough of this,” said a voice beside him.

He looked up. A girl had come down the other path. Her face was red with exertion under the pale make-up, her hair hung over her eyes in ridiculous ringlets, and she wore a dress which, while clearly made for her size, was designed for someone who was ten years younger and keen on lace edging.

She was quite attractive, although this fact was not immediately apparent.

“And you know what they say when you complain?” she demanded. This was not really addressed to Victor. He was just a convenient pair of ears.

“I can’t imagine,” said Victor politely.

“They say, ‘There’s plenty of other people out there just waiting for a chance to get into moving pictures.’ That’s what they say.”

She leaned against a gnarled tree and fanned herself with her straw hat. “And it’s too hot,” she complained. “And now I’ve got to do a ridiculous one-reeler for Silverfish, who hasn’t got the faintest idea. And some kid probably with bad breath and hay in his hair and a forehead you could lay a table on.”

“And trolls,” said Victor mildly.

“Oh gods. Not Morry and Galena?”

“Yes. Only Galena’s calling himself Rock now.”

“I thought it was going to be Flint.”

“He likes Rock.”

From behind the rocks came the plaintive bleat of Silverfish wondering where everyone had got to just when he needed them. The girl rolled her eyes.

“Oh gods. For this I’m missing lunch?”

“You could always eat it off my forehead,” said Victor, standing up.

He had the satisfaction of feeling her thoughtful gaze on the back of his neck as he retrieved his sword and gave it a few experimental swishes, with rather more force than was necessary.

“You’re the boy in the street, aren’t you?” she said.

“That’s right. You’re the girl who was going to be shot,” said Victor. “I see they missed.”

She looked at him curiously. “How did you get a job so quickly? Most people have to wait weeks for a chance.”

“Chances are where you find them, I’ve always said,” said Victor.

“But how—”

Victor had already strolled away with gleeful nonchalance. She trailed after him, her face locked in a petulant pout.

“Ah,” said Silverfish sarcastically, looking up. “My word. Everyone where they should be. Very well. We’ll go from the bit where he finds her tied to the stake. What you do,” he said to Victor, “is untie her, then drag her off and fight the Balgrog, and you,” he pointed to the girl, “you, you, you just follow him and look as, as rescued as you possibly can, OK?”

“I’m good at that,” she said, resignedly.

“No, no, no,” said Dibbler, putting his head in his hands.

“Not that again!”

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” said Silverfish. “Fights and rescues?”

“There’s got to be more to it than that!” said Dibbler.

“Like what?” Silverfish demanded.

“Oh, I don’t know. Razzmatazz. Oomph. The old zonkaroonie.”

“Funny noises? We haven’t got sound.”

“Everyone makes clicks about people running around and fighting and falling over,” said Dibbler. “There should be something more. I’ve been looking at the things you make here, and they all look the same to me.”

“Well, all sausages look the same to me,” snapped Silverfish.

“They’re meant to! That’s what people expect!”

“And I’m giving them what they expect, too,” said Silverfish. “People like to see more of what they expect. Fights and chases, that sort of thing—”

“’Scuse me, Mister Silverfish,” said the handleman, above the angry chattering of the demons.

“Yes?” snapped Dibbler.

“’Scuse me, Mister Dibbler, but I got to feed ’em ina quarter of a hour.”

Dibbler groaned.

In retrospect, Victor was always a little unclear about those next few minutes. That’s the way it goes. The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die.

There had been another stylized battle, he knew that much, with Morry and what would have been a fearsome whip if the troll hadn’t kept tangling it around his own legs. And, when the dreadful Balgrog had been beaten and had slid out of shot mugging terribly and trying to hold its wings on with one hand, he’d turned and cut the ropes holding the girl to the stake and should have dragged her sharply to the right when—

—the whispering started.

There were no words but there was something that was the heart of words, that went straight through his ears and down his spinal column without bothering to make a stopover in his brain.

He stared into the girl’s eyes and wondered if she was hearing it too.

A long way off, there were words. There was Silverfish saying, “Come on, get on with it, what are you looking at her like that for?” and the handleman saying, “They gets really fractious if they misses a meal,” and Dibbler saying, in a voice hissing like a thrown knife, “Don’t stop turning the handle.”

The edges of his vision went cloudy, and there were shapes in the cloud that changed and faded before he had a chance to examine them. Helpless as a fly in an amber flow, as much in control of his destiny as a soap bubble in a hurricane, he leaned down and kissed her.

There were more words beyond the ringing in his ears.

“Why’s he doing that? Did I tell him to do that? No one told him to do that!”

“—and then I have to muck ’em out afterward, and let me tell you, it’s no—”

“Turn that handle! Turn that handle!” screamed Dibbler.

“Now why’s he looking like that?”

“Cor!”

“If you stop turning that handle you’ll never work in this town again!”

“Listen, mister, I happen to belong to the Handlemen’s Guild—”

“Don’t stop! Don’t stop!”

Victor surfaced. The whispering faded, to be replaced by the distant boom of the breakers. The real world was back, hot and sharp, the sun pinned to the sky like a medal awarded for being a great day.

The girl took a deep breath.

“I’m, gosh, I’m terribly sorry,” babbled Victor, backing away. “I really don’t know what happened—”

Dibbler jumped up and down.

“That’s it, that’s it!” he yelled. “How soon can you have it ready?”

“Well, like I said, I got to feed the imps and muck ’em out—”

“Right, right—it’ll give me time to get some posters drawn,” said Dibbler.

“I’ve already had some done,” said Silverfish coldly.

“I bet you have, I bet you have,” said Dibbler, excitedly. “I bet you have. I bet they say things like ‘You mighte like to see a Quite Interestinge Moving Picture’!”

“What’s wrong with it?” Silverfish demanded. “It’s a bloody sight better than hot sausage!”

“I told you, when you sell sausages you don’t just hang around waiting for people to want sausage, you go out there and make them hungry. And you put mustard on ’em. And that’s what your lad there has done.”

He clapped one hand on Silverfish’s shoulder, and waved the other expansively.

“Can’t you see it?” he said. He hesitated. Strange ideas were pouring into his head faster than he could think them. He felt dizzy with excitement and possibilities.

“Sword of Passione,” he said. “That’s what we’ll call it. Not name it after some daft old bugger who’s probably not even alive anymore. Sword of Passione. Yeah. A Tumultuous Saga of—of Desire an’ Raw, Raw, Raw wossname in the Primal Heat of a Tortured Continent! Romance! Glamour! In three Searing Reels! Thrill to the Death Fight with Ravening Monsters! Scream as a thousand elephants—”

“It’s only one reel,” muttered Silverfish testily.

“Shoot some more this afternoon!” crowed Dibbler, his eyes revolving. “You just need more fights and monsters!”

“And there’s certainly no elephants,” snapped Silverfish.

Rock put up a craggy arm.

“Yes?” demanded Silverfish.

“If you’ve got some gray paint an’ stuff to make the ears out of, I’m sure me an’ Morry could—”

“No one’s ever done a three-reeler,” said Gaffer reflectively. “Could be really tricky. I mean, it’d be nearly ten minutes long.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose if I was to make the spools bigger—”

Silverfish knew he was cornered.

“Now look here,” he began.

Victor stared down at the girl. Everyone else was ignoring them.

“Er,” he said, “I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced?”

“You didn’t seem to let that stop you,” she said.

“I wouldn’t normally do something like that. I must have been…ill. Or something.”

“Oh, good. And that makes me feel a lot better, does it?”

“Shall we sit in the shade? It’s very hot out here.”

“Your eyes went all…smouldery.”

“Did they?”

“They looked really odd.”

“I felt really odd.”

“I know. It’s this place. It gets to you. D’you know,” she said, sitting down on the sand, “there’s all kind of rules for the imps and things, they mustn’t be worn out, what kind of food they get, stuff like that. No one cares about us, though. Even the trolls get better treatment.”

“It’s the way they go around being seven foot tall and weighing 1,000 pounds all the time, I expect,” said Victor.

“My name’s Theda Withel, but my friends call me Ginger,” she said.

“My name’s Victor Tugelbend. Er. But my friends call me Victor,” said Victor.

“This is your first click, is it?”

“How can you tell?”

“You looked as though you were enjoying it.”

“Well, it’s better than working, isn’t it?”

“You wait until you’ve been in it as long as I have,” she said bitterly.

“How long’s that?”

“Nearly since the start. Five weeks.”

“Gosh. It’s all happened so fast.”

“It’s the best thing that’s ever happened,” said Ginger flatly.

“I suppose so…er, are we allowed to go and eat?” said Victor.

“No. They’ll be shouting for us again any minute,” said Ginger.

Victor nodded. He had, on the whole, got through life quite happily by doing what he pleased in a firm yet easygoing sort of way, and he didn’t see why he should stop that even in Holy Wood.

“Then they’ll have to shout,” he said. “I want something to eat and a cool drink. Maybe I’ve just caught a bit too much sun.”

Ginger looked uncertain. “Well, there’s the commissary, but—”

“Good. You can show me the way.”

“They fire people just like that—”

“What, before the third reel?”

“They say ‘There’s plenty more people who’re dying to break into moving pictures,’ you see—”

“Good. That means they’ll have all afternoon to find two of them who look just like us.” He strolled past Morry, who was also trying to keep in the shade of a rock.

“If anyone wants us,” he said, “we’ll be having some lunch.”

“What, right now?” said the troll.

“Yes,” said Victor firmly, and strode on.

Behind him he could see Dibbler and Silverfish locked in heated discussion, with occasional interruptions from the handleman, who spoke in the leisurely tones of one who knows he’s going to get paid six dollars today regardless.

“—we’ll call it an epic. People will talk about it for ages.”

“Yes, they’ll say we went bankrupt!”

“Look, I know where I can get some colored woodcuts done at practically cost—”

“—I was finking, maybe if I got some string and tied the moving picture box onto wheels, so it can be moved around—”

“People’ll say, that Silverfish, there’s a moving-picture-smith with the guts to give the people what they want, they’ll say. A man to roll back the wossname of the medium—”

“—maybe if I was to make a sort of pole and swivel arrangement, we could bring the picture box right up close to—”

“What? You think they’ll say that?”

“Trust me, Tommy.”

“Well…all right. All right. But no elephants. I want to make that absolutely clear. No elephants.”

 

“Looks weird to me,” said the Archchancellor. “Looks like a bunch of pottery elephants. Thought you said it was a machine?”

“More…more of a device,” said the Bursar uncertainly. He gave it a prod. Several of the pottery elephants wobbled.

“Riktor the Tinkerer built it, I think. It was before my time.”

It looked like a large, ornate pot, almost as high as a man of large pot height. Around its rim eight pottery elephants hung from little bronze chains; one of them swung backward and forward at the Bursar’s touch.

The Archchancellor peered down inside.

“It’s all levers and bellows,” he said, distastefully.

The Bursar turned to the University housekeeper.

“Well, now, Mrs. Whitlow,” he said, “what exactly happened?”

Mrs. Whitlow, huge, pink and becorseted, patted her ginger wig and nudged the tiny maid who was hovering beside her like a tugboat.

“Tell his lordship, Ksandra,” she ordered.

Ksandra looked as though she was regretting the whole thing.

“Well, sir, please, sir, I was dusting, you see—”

“She hwas dusting,” said Mrs. Whitlow, helpfully. When Mrs. Whitlow was in the grip of acute class consciousness she could create aitches where nature never intended them to be.

“—and then it started me’king a noise—”

“Hit made hay hnoise,” said Mrs. Whitlow. “So she come and told me, your lordship, h’as hper my instructions.”

“What kind of noise, Ksandra?” said the Bursar, as kindly as he could.

“Please, sir, sort of—” she screwed up her eyes,

“‘whumm…whumm…whumm…whumm…whummwhummwhumm WHUMMWHUMM—plib,’ sir.”

“Plib,” said the Bursar, solemnly.

“Yes, sir.”

“Hplib,” echoed Mrs. Whitlow.

“That was when it spat at me, sir,” said Ksandra.

“Hexpectorated,” corrected Mrs. Whitlow.

“Apparently one of the elephants spat out a little lead pellet, Master,” said the Bursar. “That was the, er, the ‘plib.’”

“Did it, bigods,” said the Archchancellor. “Can’t have pots going around gobbin’ all over people.”

Mrs. Whitlow twitched.

“What’d it go and do that for?” Ridcully added.

“I really couldn’t say, Master. I thought perhaps you’d know. I believe Riktor was a lecturer here when you were a student. Mrs. Whitlow is very concerned,” he added, in tones that made it clear that when Mrs. Whitlow was concerned about something it would be an unwise Archchancellor who ignored her, “about staff being magically interfered with.”

The Archchancellor tapped the pot with his knuckles. “What, old ‘Numbers’ Riktor? Same fella?”

“Apparently, Archchancellor.”

“Total madman. Thought you could measure everythin’. Not just lengths and weights and that kind of stuff, but everythin’. ‘If it exists,’ he said, ‘you ought to be able to measure it.’” Ridcully’s eyes misted with memory. “Made all kinds of weird widgets. Reckoned you could measure truth and beauty and dreams and stuff. So this is one of old Riktor’s toys, is it? Wonder what it measured?”

“Ay think,” said Mrs. Whitlow, “that it should be put haway somewhere out of ’arm’s way, if it’s hall the hsame to you.”

“Yes, yes, yes, of course,” said the Bursar hurriedly. Staff were hard to keep at Unseen University.

“Get rid of it,” said the Archchancellor.

The Bursar was horrified. “Oh, no, sir,” he said. “We never throw things out. Besides, it is probably quite valuable.”

“Hmm,” said Ridcully. “Valuable?”

“Possibly an important historical artifact, Master.”

“Shove it in my study, then. I said the place needs bright’nin’ up. It’ll be one of them conversation pieces, right? Got to go now. Got to see a man about trainin’ a gryphon. Good day, ladies—”

“Er, Archchancellor, I wonder if you could just sign—” the Bursar began, but to a closing door.

No one asked Ksandra which of the pottery elephants had spat the ball, and the direction wouldn’t have meant anything to them anyway.

That afternoon a couple of porters moved the universe’s only working resograph⁵ into the Archchancellor’s study.

 

No one had found a way to add sound to moving pictures, but there was a sound that was particularly associated with Holy Wood. It was the sound of nails being hammered.

Holy Wood had gone critical. New houses, new streets, new neighborhoods, appeared overnight. And, in those areas where the hastily-educated alchemical apprentices were not yet fully alongside the trickier stages of making octo-cellulose, disappeared even faster. Not that it made a lot of difference. Barely would the smoke have cleared before someone was hammering again.

And Holy Wood grew by fission. All you needed was a steady-handed, non-smoking lad who could read alchemical signs, a handleman, a sackful of demons and lots of sunshine. Oh, and some people. But there were plenty of those. If you couldn’t breed demons or mix chemicals or turn a handle rhythmically, you could always hold horses or wait on tables and look interesting while you hoped. Or, if all else failed, hammer nails. Building after rickety building skirted the ancient hill, their thin planks already curling and bleaching in the pitiless sun, but there was already a pressing need for more.

Because Holy Wood was calling. More people arrived every day. They didn’t come to be ostlers, or tavern wenches, or short-order carpenters. They came to make movies.

And they didn’t know why.

As Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler knew in his heart, wherever two or more people are gathered together, someone will be trying to sell them a suspicious sausage in a bun.

Now that Dibbler was in fact engaged elsewhere, others had arisen to fulfil that function.

One such was Nodar Borgle the Klatchian, whose huge echoing shed wasn’t so much a restaurant as a feeding factory. Great steaming tureens occupied one end. The rest of it was tables, and around the tables were—

Victor was astonished.

—there were trolls, humans and dwarfs. And a few gnomes. And perhaps even a few elves, the most elusive of Discworld races. And lots of other things, which Victor had to hope were trolls dressed up, because if they weren’t, everyone was going to be in a lot of trouble. And they were all eating, and the amazing thing was that they were not eating one another.

“You take a plate and you queue up and then you pay for it,” said Ginger. “It’s called self-serf.”

“You pay for it before you eat it? What happens if it’s dreadful?”

Ginger nodded grimly. “That’s why.”

Victor shrugged, and leaned down to the dwarf behind the lunch counter. “I’d like—”

“It’s stoo,” said the dwarf.

“What kind of stew?”

“There ain’t more’n one kind. That’s why it’s stoo,” the dwarf snapped. “Stoo’s stoo.”

“What I meant was, what’s in it?” said Victor.

“If you need to ask, you’re not hungry enough,” said Ginger. “Two stews, Fruntkin.”

Victor stared at the gray-brown stuff that was dribbled onto his plate. Strange lumps, carried to the surface by mysterious convection currents, bobbed for a moment, and then sank back down, hopefully forever.

Borgle belonged to the Dibbler school of cuisine.

“It’s stoo or nuffin, boy.” The cook leered. “Half a dollar. Cheap at half the price.”

Victor handed over the money with reluctance, and looked around for Ginger.

“Over here,” said Ginger, sitting down at one of the long tables. “Hi, Thunderfoot. Hi, Breccia, how’s it goin’? This is Vic. New boy. Hi, Sniddin, didn’t see you there.”

Victor found himself wedged between Ginger and a mountain troll in what looked like chain mail, but it turned out to be just Holy Wood chain mail, which was inexpertly knitted string painted silver.

Ginger started talking animatedly to a four-inch-high gnome and a dwarf in one half of a bear outfit, leaving Victor feeling a little isolated.

The troll nodded at him, and then grimaced at its plate.

“Dey call dis pumice,” he said. “Dey never even bother to cut der lava off. And you can’t even taste der sand.”

Victor stared at the troll’s plate.

“I didn’t know trolls ate rock,” he said, before he could stop himself.

“Why not?”

“Aren’t you made of it?”

“Yeah. But you’re made a meat, an’ what do you eat?”

Victor looked at his own plate. “Good question,” he said.

“Vic’s doing a click for Silverfish,” said Ginger, turning around. “It looks like they’re going to make it a three-reeler.”

There was a general murmur of interest.

Victor carefully laid something yellow and wobbly on the side of his plate.

“Tell me,” he said thoughtfully, “while you’ve been filming, have any of you had a…heard a sort of…felt that you were…” He hesitated. They were all looking at him. “I mean, did you ever feel something was acting through you? I can’t think of any other way to put it.”

His fellow diners relaxed.

“Dat’s just Holy Wood,” said the troll. “It gets to you. It’s all dis creativity sloshin’ about.”

“That was a pretty bad attack you had, though,” said Ginger.

“Happens all the time,” said the dwarf reflectively. “It’s just Holy Wood. Last week, me and the lads were working on Tales of the Dwarfes and suddenly we all started singing. Just like that. Just like this song came into our heads, all at once. What d’you think of that?”

“What song?” said Ginger.

“Search me. We just call it the ‘Hiho’ song. That’s all it was. Hihohiho. Hihohiho.”

“Sound like every other dwarf song I ever did hear,” rumbled the troll.

 

It was past two o’clock when they got back to the moving-picture-making place. The handleman had the back off the picture box and was scraping at its floor with a small shovel.

Dibbler was asleep in his canvas chair with a handkerchief over his face. But Silverfish was wide awake.

“Where have you two been?” he shouted.

“I was hungry,” said Victor.

“And you’ll jolly well stay hungry, my lad, because—”

Dibbler lifted the corner of his handkerchief.

“Let’s get started,” he muttered.

“But we can’t have performers telling us—”

“Finish the click, and then sack him,” said Dibbler.

“Right!” Silverfish waved a threatening finger at Victor and Ginger. “You’ll never work in this town again!”

They got through the afternoon somehow. Dibbler made them bring a horse in, and cursed the handleman because the picture box still couldn’t be moved around. The demons complained. So they put the horse head-on in front of the box and Victor bounced up and down in the saddle. As Dibbler said, it was good enough for moving pictures.

Afterward, Silverfish very grudgingly paid them two dollars each and dismissed them.

“He’ll tell all the other alchemists,” said Ginger dispiritedly. “They stick together like glue.”

“I notice we only get two dollars a day but the trolls get three,” said Victor. “Why’s that?”

“Because there aren’t so many trolls wanting to make moving pictures,” said Ginger. “And a good handleman can get six or seven dollars a day. Performers aren’t important.” She turned and glared at him.

“I was doing OK,” she said. “Nothing special, but OK. I was getting quite a lot of work. People thought I was reliable. I was building a career—”

“You can’t build a career on Holy Wood,” said Victor.

“That’s like building a house on a swamp. Nothing’s real.”

“I liked it! And now you’ve spoilt it all! And I’ll probably have to go back to a horrible little village you’ve probably never even heard of! Back to bloody milkmaiding! Thanks very much! Every time I see a cow’s arse, I’ll think of you!”

She stormed off in the direction of the town leaving Victor with the trolls. After a while Rock cleared his throat.

“You got anywhere to stay?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” said Victor, weakly.

“There’s never enough places to stay,” said Morry.

“I thought I might sleep on the beach,” said Victor. “It’s warm enough, after all. I think I really could do with a good rest. Good night.”

He tottered off in that direction.

The sun was setting, and a wind off the sea had cooled things a little. Around the darkening bulk of the hill the lights of Holy Wood were being lit. Holy Wood only relaxed in the darkness. When your raw material is daylight, you don’t waste it.

It was pleasant enough on the beach. No one much went there. The driftwood, cracked and salt-crusted, was no good for building. It was stacked in a long white row on the tide line.

Victor pulled together enough to make a fire, and lay back and watched the surf.

From the top of the next dune, hidden behind a dry clump of grass, Gaspode the Wonder Dog watched him thoughtfully.

 

It was two hours after midnight.

It had them now, and poured joyfully out of the hill, poured its glitter into the world.

Holy Wood dreams…

It dreams for everyone.

In the hot breathless darkness of a clapboard shack, Ginger Withel dreamed of red carpets and cheering crowds. And a grating. She kept coming back to a grating, in the dream, where a rush of warm air blew up her skirts…

In the not much cooler darkness of a marginally more expensive shack, Silverfish the moving picturesmith dreamed of cheering crowds, and someone giving him a prize for the best moving picture ever made. It was a great big statue.

Out in the sand dunes Rock and Morry dozed fitfully, because trolls are night creatures by nature and sleeping in darkness bruised the instincts of eons. They dreamed of mountains.

Down on the beach, under the stars, Victor dreamed of pounding hooves, flowing robes, pirate ships, sword fights, chandeliers…

On the next dune, Gaspode the Wonder Dog slept with one eye open and dreamed of wolves.

But Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler was not dreaming, because he was not asleep.

It had been a long ride to Ankh-Morpork and he preferred selling horses to riding them, but he was there now.

The storms that so carefully avoided Holy Wood didn’t worry about Ankh-Morpork, and it was pouring with rain. That didn’t stop the city’s night life, though—it just made it damper.

There was nothing you couldn’t buy in Ankh-Morpork, even in the middle of the night. Dibbler had a lot of things to buy. He needed posters painted. He needed all sorts of things. Many of them involved ideas he’d had to invent in his head on the long ride, and now had to explain very carefully to other people. And he had to explain it fast.

The rain was a solid curtain when he finally staggered out into the gray light of dawn. The gutters overflowed. Along the rooftops, repulsive gargoyles threw up expertly over passers-by although, since it was now five a.m., the crowds had thinned out a bit.

Throat took a deep breath of the thick city air. Real air. You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air. You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years.

For the first time in days he felt that he was thinking clearly. That was the strange thing about Holy Wood. When you were there it all seemed natural, it all seemed just what life was all about, but when you got away from it and looked back, it was like looking at a brilliant soap bubble. It was as though, when you were in Holy Wood, you weren’t quite the same person.

Well, Holy Wood was Holy Wood, and Ankh was Ankh, and Ankh was solid and proof, in Throat’s opinion, against any Holy Wood weirdness.

He splashed through the puddles, listening to the rain.

After a while he noticed, for the first time in his life, that it had a rhythm.

Funny. You could live in a city all your life, and you had to go away and come back again before you noticed the way the rain dripping off the gutters had a rhythm all its own: DUMdi-dum-dum, dumdi-dumdi-DUM-DUM…

A few minutes later Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs of the Night Watch were sharing a friendly roll-up in the shelter of a doorway and doing what the Night Watch was best at, which was keeping warm and dry and staying out of trouble.

They were the only witnesses to the manic figure which splashed down the dripping street, pirouetted through the puddles, grabbed a drainpipe to swing around the corner and, clicking its heels together merrily, disappeared from view.

Sgt. Colon handed the soggy dog-end back to his companion.

“Was that old Throat Dibbler?” he said after a while.

“Yeah,” said Nobby.

“He looked happy, didn’t he?”

“Must be off ’is nut, if you ask me,” said Nobby. “Singing in the rain like that.”

 

Whumm…whumm…

The Archchancellor, who had been updating his dragon stud book and enjoying a late night drink in front of the fire, looked up.

…whumm…whumm…whumm…

“Bigods!” he muttered, and wandered over to the big pot. It was actually wobbling from side to side, as if the building was shaking.

The Archchancellor watched, fascinated.

…whumm…whummwhummwhummWHUMM.

It wobbled to a standstill, and went silent.

“Odd,” said the Archchancellor. “Damned odd.”

Plib.

On the other side of the room, his brandy decanter shattered.

Ridcully the Brown took a deep breath.

“Bursaar!”

 

Victor was woken up by sandflies. The air was already warm. It was going to be another fine day.

He waded out into the shallows to wash and clear his head.

Let’s see…he still had his two dollars from yesterday, plus a handful of pennies. He could afford to stay a while, especially if he slept on the beach. And Borgle’s stoo, while only food in the technical sense, was cheap enough—although, come to think of it, eating there might involve embarrassing encounters with Ginger.

He took another step, and sank.

Victor hadn’t swum in the sea before. He surfaced, half-drowned, treading water furiously. The beach was only a few yards away.

He relaxed, gave himself time to get his breath back, and swam a leisurely crawl out beyond the breakers. The water was crystal clear. He could see the bottom shelving away sharply to—he surfaced for a quick breath—a dim blueness in which it was just possible, through the teeming shoals of fish, to see the outline of pale, rectangular rocks scattered on the sand.

He tried a dive, fighting his way down until his ears clanged. The largest lobster he had ever seen waved its feelers at him from a rocky spire and snapped away into the depths.

Victor bobbed up again, gasping, and struck out for the shore.

Well, if you couldn’t make it in moving pictures there was an opening here for a fisherman, that was certain.

A beachcomber would do all right, as well. There was enough wind-dried firewood piled up on the edge of the dunes to keep Ankh-Morpork’s fires supplied for years. No one in Holy Wood would dream of lighting a fire except for cooking or company.

And someone had been doing just that. As he waded ashore Victor realized that the wood further along the beach had been stacked not haphazardly but apparently by design, in neat piles. Further along, stones had been stacked into a crude fireplace.

It was clogged with sand. Maybe someone else had been living on the beach, waiting for their big chance in moving pictures. Come to think of it, the timber behind the half-buried stones had a dragged-together look. You could imagine, looking at it from the sea, that several balks of timber had been set up to form an arched doorway.

Perhaps they were still there. Perhaps they might have something to drink.

They were, indeed, still there. But they hadn’t needed a drink for months.

 

It was eight in the morning. A thunderous knocking awoke Bezam Planter, owner of the Odium, one of Ankh-Morpork’s mushrooming crop of moving-picture pits.

He’d had a bad night. The people of Ankh-Morpork liked novelty. The trouble was that they didn’t like novelty for long. The Odium had done great business for a week, had broken even for the next week, and was now dying. The late showing last night had been patronized by one deaf dwarf and an orangutan, who’d brought along its own peanuts. Bezam relied on the sale of peanuts and banged grains for his profit, and wasn’t in a good mood.

He opened the door and stared out blearily.

“We’re shut ’til two o’clock,” he said. “Mat’nee. Come back then. Seats in all parts.”

He slammed the door. It rebounded off Throat Dibbler’s boot and hit Bezam on the nose.

“I’ve come about the special showing of Sword of Passione,” said Throat.

“Special showing? What special showing?”

“The special showing I’m about to tell you about,” said Throat.

“We ain’t showing nothin’ about any special passionate swords. We’re showin’ The Exciting—”

“Mister Dibbler says yore showing Sword of Passione,” rumbled a voice.

Throat leaned against the doorway. Behind him was a slab of rock. It looked as though someone had been throwing steel balls at it for thirty years.

It creased in the middle and leaned down toward Bezam.

He recognized Detritus. Everyone recognized Detritus. He wasn’t a troll you forgot.

“But I haven’t even heard of—” Bezam began.

Throat pulled a large tin from under his coat, and grinned.

“And here are some posters,” he added, producing a fat white roll.

“Mister Dibbler let me stick some up on walls,” said Detritus proudly.

Bezam unrolled the poster. It was in eye-watering colors. It showed a picture of what might just possibly be Ginger pouting in a blouse too small for her, and Victor in the act of throwing her over one shoulder while fighting an assortment of monsters with the other hand. In the background, volcanoes were erupting, dragons were zooming through the sky, and cities were burning down.

“‘The Motione-Picture They Coud Not Banne!’,” read Bezam hesitantly. “‘A Scorching Adventure In the White-Hotte Dawne of A New Continont! A Mann and a Womann Throne Together in the Wherlpool of a World Gone Madde!! STARING **Delores De Syn** as The Woman and **Victor Maraschino** as Cohen the Barbarian!!! THRILS! ADVENTURE!! ELEPHANTS!!! Cominge Soone to A Pit nr. You!!!!’”

He read it again.

“Who’s Staring Delores De Syn?” he said, suspiciously.

“That’s starring,” said Throat. “That’s why we’ve put stars against their names, see.” He leaned closer and lowered his voice to a piercing whisper. “They do say,” he said, “that she’s the daughter of a Klatchian pirate and his wild, headstrong captive, and he’s the son of…the son of…a rogue wizard and a reckless gypsy flamenco dancer.”

“Cor!” said Bezam, impressed despite himself. Dibbler permitted himself a mental slap on the back. He’d been quite taken with it himself.

“I reckon you should start showing it in about an hour,” he said.

“At this time in the morning?” said Bezam. The click he had obtained for the day was An Exciting Study of Pottery Making, which had been worrying him. This seemed a much better proposition.

“Yes,” said Dibbler. “Because a lot of people are going to want to watch it.”

“I dunno about that,” said Bezam. “Houses have been falling off lately.”