Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

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 afire.

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.

ed.' 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 unco-operative, 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.'