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 practised an energetic and idiosyncratic technique in front of the mirror, and the mirror had never beaten him yet.
e also didn't know why.
But he was determined to find out.
None 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 afterwards, you had to understand its buildings.
You'd see a box on the sand. It'd 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. Arid there didn't seem to-
'Why don't you look where you're going!'