Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

'We don't leave our people in there,' he muttered.

'Apes, Archchancellor,' said the Bursar automatically.

The Thing lurched towards Victor. It moved uneasily, fighting against the forces of reality that tugged at it. It flickered as it tried to maintain the shape it had climbed into the world with, so that images of Ginger alternated with glimpses of something that writhed and coiled.

It needed magic.

It eyed Victor and the sword, and if it was capable of something so sophisticated as knowledge, it knew that it was vulnerable.

It turned, ant bore down on Ginger and the wizards.

Who burst into flame.

The Dean burned with a particularly pretty blue colour.

'Don't worry, young lady,' said the Chair from the heart of his fire. 'It's illusion. It's not real.'

'You're telling me?' said Ginger. 'Get on with it!'

The wizards moved forward.

Ginger heard footsteps behind her. It was the Dibblers.

'Why's it frightened of the flame?' said Soll, and the Thing backed away from the advancing wizards. 'It's just illusion. It must be able to feel there's no heat.'

Ginger shook her head. She looked like someone surfing on a curling wave of hysteria, perhaps because it is not every day you see giant images of yourself trampling down a city.

'It's used Holy Wood magic,' she said. 'So it can't disobey Holy Wood rules. It can't feel, it can't hear. It can only see. What it sees is what is real. And what film fears is fire.'

Now the giant Ginger was pressed against the tower.

'Well, it's trapped,' said Dibbler. 'They've got it now.'

The Thing blinked at the advancing flames.

It turned. It reached up with its free hand. It began to climb the tower.

Victor slid off his horse and stopped concentrating. It vanished.

Despite his panic, he found room for a tiny gloat. If only wizards had gone to the clicks, they'd have known exactly how to do it.

It was the critical fusion frequency. Even reality had one. If you could only make something exist for a tiny part of a second, that didn't mean you'd failed. It meant you had to keep on doing it.

He scurried crabwise along the base of the tower, staring up at the climbing Thing, and tripped over something metallic. It turned out to be the Librarian's dropped pike. A little further off, the end of the rope trailed in a puddle.

He stared at them for a moment, then used the pike to chop a few feet off the rope to make a crude shoulder strap for the weapon.

He grabbed the rope and gave it an experimental tug, and then . . .

There was an unpleasant lack of resistance to the pull. He threw himself backwards just before hundreds of feet of sodden rope smacked damply on to the paving.

He looked around desperately for another route to the top.

The Dibblers watched open mouthed as the Thing climbed. It wasn't moving very fast, and occasionally had to wedge the gibbering Librarian into a handy buttress while it found the next handhold, but it was moving up.

'Oh, yes. Yes. Yes,' breathed Soll. 'What a picture! Pure kinema!'

'A giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building,' sighed Dibbler. 'And we're not even having to pay wages!'