Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

'What - what was that place, anyway?'

Victor shifted in the darkness, trying to make himself comfortable.

'I don't know,' he confessed. 'At first I thought it was a temple. And it looked as though people used it for watching moving pictures.'

'But it looked hundreds of years old!'

'Thousands, I expect.'

'But look, that can't be right,' said Ginger, in the small voice of one trying to be reasonable while madness is breaking down the door with a cleaver. 'The alchemists only got the idea a few months ago.'

'Yes. It's something to think about.'

He reached out and found her. Her body was ramrod stiff and flinched at his touch.

'We're safe enough here,' he added. 'Gaspode will soon bring back some help. Don't you worry about that.'

He tried not to think about the sea slapping at the stairs, and the many-legged things that scuttled over the midnight floor. He tried to put out of his mind the thought of octopi slithering silently over the seats in front of that living, shifting screen. He tried to forget the patrons who had been sitting in the darkness while, above them, centuries passed. Perhaps they were waiting for the lady to come around with the banged grains and hot sausages.

The whole of life is just like watching a click, he thought. Only it's as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it all out yourself from the clues.

And you never, never get a chance to stay in your seat for the second house.

Candlelight flickered in the University corridor.

The Bursar did not think of himself as a brave man. The most he felt happy about tackling was a column of numbers, and being good at numbers had taken him further up the hierarchy of Unseen University than magic had ever done. But he couldn't let this pass .

. . . whumm . . . whumm . . . whummwhummwhummWHUMM WHUMM.

He crouched behind a pillar and counted eleven pellets.

Little jets of sand puffed out of the bags. They were coming at two-minute intervals now.

He ran to the heap of sandbags and tugged at them.

Reality wasn't the same everywhere. Well, of course, every wizard knew that. Reality wasn't very thick anywhere on the Discworld. In some places it was very thin indeed. That was why magic worked. What Riktor thought he could measure was changes in reality, places where the real was rapidly becoming unreal. And every wizard knew what could happen if things became unreal enough to form a hole.

But, he thought, as he clawed at the bags, you'd need massive amounts of magic. We'd be bound to spot that amount of magic. It'd stand out like . . . well, like a lot of magic.

I must have taken at least fifty seconds so far.

He peered at the vase in its bunker.

Oh.

He'd been hoping he might be wrong.

All the pellets had been expelled in one direction. Half a dozen sandbags had been shot full of holes. And Numbers had thought that a couple of pellets in a month indicated a dangerous build-up of unreality . . .

The Bursar mentally drew a line from the vase, through the damaged sandbags, to the far end of the corridor .

. . . whumm . . . whumm . . .

He jerked back, and then realized that there was no need to worry. All the pellets were being shot out of the ornamental elephant's head opposite him. He relaxed.

. . . whumm . . . whumm . . .

The vase rocked violently as mysterious machinery swung around inside it. The Bursar put his head closer to it. Yes, there was definitely a hissing sound, like air being squeezed