Moving Pictures (Discworld 10)

More people were drifting into the plaza now. Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler had wandered off and was doing a busy trade with those latenight revellers who were too drunk to prevent optimism triumphing over experience; anyone who bought a meal at one a.m. after a7 night's revelling 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 round 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 downwards. 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.