Moving Pictures

It held celluloid magic, dreams -- and nightmares -- come true, realities altered at an almost impossible rate. And the Discworld was about to get more than its share of action, adventure, romance -- and a menace which awaited only an old man's death to start the cameras rolling (or more precisely, to start whipping the imps imprisoned in the camera boxes into a film-drawing frenzy).

Suddenly a cast of thousands, former denizens of Ankh-Morpork and points unknown, were falling under the spell. As the alien cliches of Tinsel Town pour into the world, it's up to the Disc's first film stars to find out...

Quotes

(Except that of course you can't have a final frontier, because there'd be nothing for it to be a frontier to, but as frontiers go, it's pretty penultimate...)

The Discworld is as unreal as it is possible to be while still being just real enough to exist.

A crude hut of driftwood had been built on the long curve of the beach, although describing it as "built" was a slander on skilled crude hut builders throughout the ages; if the sea had simply been left to pile the wood up it might have done a better job.

There's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork, greatest of Discworld cities.

At least, there's a saying that there's a saying that all roads lead to Ankh-Morpork.

And it's wrong. All roads lead away from Ankh-Morpork, but sometimes people just walk along them the wrong way.

...maybe it is a bit like Hell would be if the shut the fires off and stabled a herd of incontinent cows there for a year...

Citizens hate living there and, if they have to move away on business or adventure or, more usually, until some statue of limitations runs out, can't wait to get back so they can enjoy hating it some more.

They put stickers on the back of their carts saying "Ankh-Morpork -- Loathe It or Leave It."

...Ankh-Morpork doesn't fear enemies. In fact it welcomes enemies, provided they are enemies with money to spend.

In fact the Guild of Merchants' famous publication Wellcome to Ankh-Morporke, Citie of One Thousand Surprises now has an entire section entitled Soe you're a Barbaeriean Invader? which has notes on night life, folklorique bargains in the bazaar and, under the heading "Steppe-ing Out," a list of restaurants that do a dependable mares' milk and yak pudding. And many a pointed-helmeted vandal has trotted back to his freezing yurt wondering why he seems to be a great deal poorer and the apparent owner of a badly-woven rug, a litre of undrinkable wine and a stuffed purple donkey in a straw hat.

It was the sort of thing you expected in the Street of Alchemists. The neighbours preferred explosions, which were at least identifiable and soon over. They were better than the smells, which crept up on you.

"No, I'm thinking about the bugger over Tsort way, or somewhere. He was in his bath and he had this idea for something, and he ran down the street yelling."

"Meat pies! Hot sausages! Inna bun! So fresh the pig h'an't noticed they're gone!"

Bursar: "Alchemy has never interested me. It's altogether too ... too..."
Ridcully: "Dangerous. Lot of damn mixin' things up and saying, hey, what'll happen if we add a drop of the yellow stuff, and then goin' around without yer eyebrows for a fortnight."

The senior wizard in a world of magic had the same prospects of long-term employment as a pogo stick tester in a minefield.

The name might change occassionally, but what did matter was that there always was an Archchancellor and the Archchancellor's most important job, as the Bursar saw it, was to sign things, preferably, from the Bursar's point of view, without reading them first.

...it turned out that Ridcully the Brown did speak to the birds. In fact he shouted at birds, and what he normally shouted was, "Winged you, yer bastard!"

The beasts of the field and fowls of the air did know Ridcully the Brown. They'd got so good at pattern-recognition that, for a radius of about twenty miles around the Ridcully estates, they'd run, hide or in desperate cases attack violently at the mere sight of a pointy hat.

You couldn't fish in the river Ankh; you had to jump up and down on the hooks even to make them sink.

If you couldn't shoot arrows in it, hunt it or hook it, he couldn't see much point in it.

...since the new Archchancellor never paid much attention to anything anyone said while he was eating, and Poons never noticed that he wasn't getting any answers, they got along quite well.

Whole days went by without being punctuated by small explosions. The city settled down again, which was a foolish thing to do.

What the Bursar failed to consider was that no more bangs doesn't mean they've stopped doing it, whatever it is. It just means they're doing it right.

A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.

The Alchemists' Guildehall was new. It was always new. It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occassion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a useful move.

Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists Guild. He had one had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy. [Footnote: The alternative was choosing of his own free will to be thrown into the scorpion pit.]

It wasn't that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn't notice them, or thought they were walruses.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.

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.

Ridcully: "Can't have it. Can't have it, yer know. Can't have [orangutans] shambling around the place. Get rid of him."
Bursar: "Good grief, no! He's the best Librarian we've ever had. And tremendous value for the money."
Ridcully: "Why? What'd we pay him?"
Bursar: "Peanuts."

Ridcully: "I went into the Uncommon Room this morning, and it was full of chaps snoring!"
Bursar: "That would be the senior masters, Master. I would say they are supremely fit, myself."
Ridcully: "Fit? The Dean looks like a man who's swallered a bed!"
Bursar: "At, but Master, the word 'fit', as I understand it, means 'appropriate to a purpose,' and I would say the body of the Dean is supremely appropriate to the purpose of sitting around all day and eating big heavy meals."

"That a joke?" he said, in the suspicious tones or someone who wouldn't really understand the term "sense of humour" even if you sat down for an hour and explained it to him with diagrams.

Ridcully: "A few twenty-mile runs and the Dean'd be a different man."
Bursar: "Well, yes. He'd be dead."
Ridcully: "He'd be healthy."
Bursar: "Yes, but still dead."

"Yes, Master. You know? They're the thinner ones with the pale faces? Because we're a university? They come with the whole thing, like rats--"

[Victor] was lying on Ponder's bed. At least, his shoulder blades were. His body extended up the wall. This is a perfectly normal position for a student taking his ease.

Victor: "How does the monster Tshup Aklathep, Infernal Star Toad with A Million Young, torture its victims to death?"
Ponder: "It ... don't tell me ... it holds them down and shows them pictures of its children until their brains implode."
Victor: "Yep. Always wondered how that happens, myself. I suppose after you've said, 'Yes, he's got your eyes' for the thousandth time you're about ready to commit suicide in any case."

Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.

When [Victor had] been small, people had said things like, "And what do you want to be, little man?" and he'd said, "I don't know. What have you got?"

And he had a thin moustache, which in a certain light made him look debonair and, in another, made him look as though he had been drinking a thick chocolate milk shake.

He'd been heading for the little alley behind the University and the piece of wall with the conveniently spaced removable bricks where, for hundreds and hundreds of years, student wizards had quietly got around, or more precisely climbed over, Unseen University's curfew restrictions.

People who didn't apply themselves to the facts in hand might have thought that Victor Tugelbend would be fat and unhealthy. In fact, he was undoubtedly the most athletically-inclined student in the University. Having to haul around extra poundage was far too much effort, so he saw to it that he never put it on and he kept himself in trim because doing things with decent muscles was far less effort than trying to achieve things with bags of flab.

A small crowd collected very easily in Ankh-Morpork. As a city, it had some of the most accomplished spectators in the universe. They'd watch anything, expecially if there was any possibility of anyone getting hurt in an amusing way.

Victor eyed the glistening tubes in the tray around Dibbler's neck. They smelled appetising. They always did. And then you bit into them, and learned once again that Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler could find a use for bits of an animal that the animal didn't know it had got. Dibbler had worked out that with enough fried onions and mustard people would eat anything.

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.

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?"

One of the last things Victor remembered was a voice beside his knee saying, "Could have bin worse, mister. I could have said 'miaow'."

...[Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler] had paused, before leaving the city, to sell his sausage-in-a-bun business cheaply to a dwarf who could not believe his luck (after actually trying some of the sausages, would still not be able to believe his luck).

No-one 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 scrutinised 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...

Victor: "I don't know if I'd be any good at acting, though."
Silverfish: "Oh, you'll be okay. It's very hard to be bad at acting in moving pictures."

...[Cut-me-own-]Throat was one of those people who could identify the thought at the other end of the process, in this case I am now very rich, draw a line between the two, and then think his way along it, slowly and patiently, until he got to the other end.

Not that it worked. There was always, he found, some small but vital flaw in the process. It generally involved a strange reluctance on the part of people to buy what he had to sell.

Dibbler's expression was the expression worn by something long and sleek and white as it swims over the reef and into the warm shallow waters of the kiddies' paddling area.

He clasped Silverfish's unresisting hand and then placed his other hand on the man's shoulder and stepped forward, pumping the first hand vigorously. The effect was of acute affability, and it meant that if Silverfish backed away he would dislocate his own elbow.

There was no analogy for Dibbler's grin now. If it had managed to be any wider, the top of his head would have fallen off.

Gaffer: "Don't touch that! That's actual film in there. You got to be very careful with it. You mustn't let it get too hot because it's made of octo-cellulose, and it don't like sharp knocks either."
Victor: "What happens to it, then?"
Gaffer: "Who knows? No-one's ever lived long enough to tell us."

Gaffer: "You'll be in front of the moving-picture box."
Victor: "Except that I don't know how to act."
Gaffer: "Do you know how to do what you're told?"
Victor: "What? Well. Yes. I suppose so."
Gaffer: "That's all you need, lad. That's all you need. That and big muscles."

"I've eaten at Harga's House of Ribs," said Victor. "I wouldn't say it's the best. Not the best. A long way from being the best." He thought for a bit. "About as far away from being the best as you can get, in fact."

Goddes and Men Saide It Was Notte To Bee, But They Would Notte Listen!
Pelias and Melisande, A Storie of Forbiden Love!
A searing Sarger of Passion that Bridged Spaes and Tyme!
Thys wille shok you!
With a 1,000 elephants!

Victor and Silverfish read it carefully, as one reads a dinner menu in an alien language. This was an alien language, and to make it worse it was also their own.

Dibbler: "[People] want dancing girls! They want frills! They want elephants! They want people falling off roofs! They want dreams! The world is full of little people with big dreams!"
Victor: "What, you mean like dwarfs and gnomes and so on?"

"The thing is that Mr. Dibbler can even sell sausages to people who have bought them off him before."

Victor: "Do a lot of this sort of thing, do you?"
Galena: "Yeah. All the time. Like, in A King's Ransom, I play a troll who rushed out an' hit people. An' in The Dark Forest, I played a troll who rushed out an' hit people. An', an', in Mystery Mountain I play a troll who rushed out, an' jumped up an' down on people. It doesn't pay to get type-cast."

The trolls exchanged a brief glance, which nevertheless contrived to say: amazing, isn't it, that things like this apparently rule the world.

Silverfish: "All right, everybody. We'll do the bit where Victor fights the dreaded Balgrog."
Victor: "What's a Balgrog?"
Rock: "It's a traditional evil monster what is basically Morry painted green with wings stuck on."

Dibbler: "There's got to be more to it than that!"
Silverfish: "Like what?"
Dibbler: "Oh, I don't know. Razzmatazz. Oomph. The old zonkaroonie."
Silverfish: "Funny noises?"

Behind him he could see Dibbler and Silverfish locked in heated discussion, with occassional interruptions from the handleman, who spoke in the leisurely tones of one who knows he's going to get paid six dollars today regardless.

As Cut-me-own-Throat Dibbler knew in his heart, wherever two or more people are gathered together, someone will be trying to sell them a suspicious sausage in a bun.

...there were trolls, humans, and dwarfs. And a few gnomes. And perhaps even a few elves, the most elusive of Discworld races. And lots of other things, which Victor had to hope were trolls dressed up, because if they weren't, everyone was going to be in a lot of trouble. And they were all eating, and the amazing thing was that they were not eating one another.

Victor: "You pay for it before you eat it? What happens if it's dreadful?"
Ginger: "That's why."

Fruntkin: "It's stoo."
Victor: "What kind of stew?"
Fruntkin: "There ain't more'n' one kind. That's why it's stoo. Stoo's stoo."
Victor: "What I meant was, what's in it?"
Ginger: "If you need to ask, you're not hungry enough."

Victor: "I didn't know trolls ate rock."
Troll: "Why not?"
Victor: "Aren't you made of it?"
Troll: "Yeah. But you're made a meat, an' what do you eat?"

Dwarf: "Last week, me and the lads were working on Tales of the Dwarfs and suddenly we all started singing. Just like that. Just like this sont came into our heads, all at once. What'd you think of that?"
Ginger: "What song?"
Dwarf: "Search me. We just call it the 'Hiho' song. That's all it was. Hihohiho. Hihohiho."

"I liked it! And now you've spoilt it all! And I'll probably have to go back to a horrible little village you've probably never even heard of! Back to bloody milkmaiding! Thanks very much! Every time I see a cow's arse, I'll think of you!"

You would have to go a long way to find air that was realer than Ankh-Morpork air. You could tell just by breathing it that other people had been doing the same thing for thousands of years.

Probably only one person in the world had been interested in whether the old man lived or died, and he'd been the first to know.

Victor stared at the murky surface of the broth. Borgle worked on the principle that if you find it in water, it's a fish. There was something purple in there and it had at least ten legs.

Victor had never worked for anything in his life. In his experience, jobs were things that happened to other people.

Horseman: "Waitin' for yer big break in the clicks, right?"
Victor: "No. I've had my big break, in fact."
Horseman: "Why you here then?"
Victor: "I broke it."

Bezam Planter stared at the pile of coins in front of him. Throat Dibbler moved his hands and it was a smaller pile of coins, but it was still a bigger pile of coins than Bezam had ever seen while in a waking state.

Victor: "What's the song about?"
Rock: "Is ancient folklorique troll song. Is about Amber and Jasper. They were -- Friends. Good friends?"
Victor: "I think I know what you mean."
Rock: "And one day Amber takes her troll's dinner down to the cave and finds him ... with another lady troll. So she goes home and get her club and come back and beat him to death, thump, thump, thump. 'Cos he was her troll and he done her wrong. Is very romantic song."

Then someone started playing the harmonica. They weren't very good at it. Most of the notes were wrong, and those that were right were cracked. There was a tune in there somewhere, in the same way that there's a bit of beef in a hamburger grinder.

Man: "Yeah, and what's this runny stuff?"
Fruntkin: "That is the mayonnaisey. Made it myself. Out of a book."
Man: "Yeah, I expect you did. Clearly oil, eggs, and vinegar were not involved, right?"

"I dunno. I suppose you compress them right up small and they burst into this mass of flaming hydrogen?"

Gaspode: "World's only bloody harmonica-playing dog. Tuppence."
Victor: "Well, you don't play very well. I couldn't recognise the tune."
Gaspode: "You're not supposed to recognise the bloody tune. I'm a dog. You're supposed to be bloody amazed I can bloody well get a squeak out of the bloody thing."

On the tiny stage, Ruby was crooning something in a voice like a ship in thick fog and bad trouble.

SUB-TITLE: "Vunce again I am fallink in luf (lit., experiencing the pleasant feeling of being hit over the head by Chondrodite, the troll god of love)."

Note: Chondrodite must not be confused with Gigalith, the troll god who gives trolls wisdom by hitting them on the head with a rock, or Silicarous, the troll god who brings trolls good fortune by hitting them on the head with a rock, or with the folk here Monolith, who first wrested the secret of rocks from the gods.

"Never seen colour before, right? Dogs see in black-an'-white, as I expect you knows, you bein' a great reader. Red comes as a nasty shock, I can tell you. You fink your dinner is just this white bone with shades of grey on it, suddenly it turns out for years you bin eatin' this gharsteley red and purple stuff."

It wasn't that he'd been talking to a dog. People often talked to dogs. The same applied to the cat. And maybe even the rabbit. It was the conversation with the mouse and the duck that might be considered odd.

"One minute I'm just another rabbit and happy about it, next minute whazaam, I'm thinking. That's a major drawback if you're looking for happiness as a rabbit, let me tell you. You want grass and sex, not thoughts like 'What's it all about, when you get right down to it?'"

Gaspode: "Tell him what you did next."
Cat: "We came here."
Victor: "From Ankh-Morpork?"
Cat: "Yeah."
Victor: "That's nearly thirty miles!"
Cat: "Yeah, and take it from me, it's hard to hitch-hike when you's a cat."

Victor: "So you'd know about the old man on the beach?"
Rabbit: "Oh, him. Yeah. Him. He was always coming up here."
Victor: "What sort of person was he?"
Rabbit: "Listen, buster, up to four days ago I had a vocabulary consisting of two verbs and one noun. What do yout think I thought he was?"

"I was thinking that's more a cat's name," said Victor, starting to sweat. "Mice have friendly little names, like -- like Squeak."

"The thing is, the duck says," said Gaspode, "that all this is part of the same thing. Humans and trolls and everything coming here. Animals suddenly talking. The duck says he thinks it's caused by something here."

"Look, friend," said the rabbit, "when you can fly all the way across the sea and even end up finding the same bloody continent, you can start badmouthing ducks."

The Bursar shrugged. "This pot," he said, peering closely, "is actually quite an old Ming vase."

"A dead giveaway, is that," said a voice from the level of Victor's knees. "It means some poor bugger is about to be taken to the cleaners."

"Partly a'cos of subtle signs what you don't seem to be abler recognise," said Gaspode, "and partly because he's actin' like a complete twerp, really."

Victor: "Why's [the sword] bent?"
Costume Lady: "I think it's meant to be, dear."
Victor: "I thought swords had to be straight."
Costume Lady: "Perhaps they start out straight and go bendy with use. A lot of things do."

...cinematographic history was made with a shot of three dwarfs, four men, two trolls and a dog all riding one camel and screaming in terror for it to stop.

Victor: "How do you ride [the camel]?"
Handler: "When you want to go forward you swear at it and hit it with a stick, and when you want to stop you swear at it and really hit it with a stick."
Victor: "What happens if you want it to turn?"
Handler: "Ah, well, you're onto the Advanced Manual there."

Rock: "Er, I was just wondering, Mr. Dibbler ... what is my motivation for this scene?"
Dibbler: "Motivation?"
Rock: "Yes. Er, I got to know, see."
Dibbler: "How about: I'll fire you if you don't do it properly."
Rock: "Right you are, Mr. Dibbler."

"Wow," he said. An expanse of barely-clad buttock occupied a view recently occupied by the camel's neck. It was an improvement.

Rock: "...an' then he gave her this, this, thing humans do with their lips--"
Victor: "Whistle?"
Rock: "Nah, the other thing. Sounds like a cork coming out of a bottle."
Ginger: "Kiss."
Rock: "Yeah. Not that I'm any judge, but it seemed to go on for a while. Definitely very, you know, kissy."
Gaspode: "I thought it was going to be bucket-of-water time myself."

Azhural: "How many elephants we got?"
M'Bu: "I just done them. We got three."
Azhural: "Are you sure?"
M'Bu: "Yes, boss. It's easy to be sure, with elephants."

A man might be uncertain about how many wives he had, but never about elephants.

Azhural: "No, we'd have to go around on the coast. The reason being, there's the jungle just here and here. No roads in the jungle."
M'Bu: "Where a thousand elephants want to go, boss, they don't need no roads."
Azhural: "But here's the Mountains of the Sun. Very high. Lots of deep ravines. And no bridges."
M'Bu: "I know where there's a lot of prime lumber just been uprooted, boss."
Azhural: "Yeah? Okay, boy, but we've still got to get it into the mountains."
M'Bu: "It just so happens that a t'ousand real strong elephants'll be goin' that way, boss."

Ginger: "Everyone marries their cousins where I come from."
Victor: "Why?"
Ginger: "I suppose it saves having to worry about what to do on Saturday nights."

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it's just another job. I bet even people like Cohen the Barbarian get up in the morning thinking, 'Oh, no, not another day of crushing the jewelled thrones of the world beneath my sandalled feet.'"

When a wizard died, all his papers were stored in one of the outlying reaches of the Library. Shelf after shelf of quietly mouldering documents, the haunt of mysterious beetles and dry rot, stretched away into an unguessable distance. Everyone kept telling everyone that there was a wealth of material here for researchers, if only someone could find the time to do it.

He glanced at the handwriting that flowed across the page. It had a very small, cramped, deliberate look. Someone had told him that this was because Numbers Riktor had been an anal retentive. The Bursar didn't know what that meant, and hoped never to find out.

"That's what intelligence does for your sex life," said Don't-call-me-Mr.-Thumpy. "Rabbits never have that sort of trouble. Go, Sow, Thank You Doe."

All dwarfs have beards and wear many layers of clothing. Their courtships are largely concerened with finding out, in delicate and circumspect ways, what sex the other dwarf is.

Trolls have 5,400 words for rocks and one for vegetation. Oograah means everything from moss to giant redwoods. The way trolls see it, if you can't eat it, it's not worth naming it.

Dibbler: "But they're amateurs! And crooks!"
Victor: "Well, that's a relief, Mr. Dibbler."
Dibbler: "Why's that?"
Victor: "Well, it'd be dreadful if they were crooks and professional."

Well, yes, thought Gaspode. He's like an uncle to most people here. That's because they're his nephews.

"Oh, I expect you think he is," said Dibbler. "But you've just got to look at the two of them. On the one hand there's this bright, alert, handsome animal, and on the other there's this dust ball with a hangover."

"Nice to see you, nice to see you, drop in again any time, only not too frequently, let's have lunch sometime, now get out, Soll!"

"Pedigree? Pedigree? What's a pedigree? It's just breedin'. I had a father too, you know. And two grandads. And four great-grandads. And many of 'em were the same dog, even."

Victor: "'Per-cent-age of the gross'."
Gaspode: "Good lad."
Victor: "What does it mean?"
Gaspode: "Don't you worry about that. You just have to say it's what you want, okay? When the time's right."
Victor: "When will the time be right, then?"
Gaspode: "Oh, I reckon when Dibbler's just got a mouthful of food'd be favourite."

"Disgustin' stuff," said Gaspode. "All tubes and innards. I wouldn't give it to a dog, and I am one."

"Detritus, go around to Borgle's. See what he's got. Not the stuff he gives to the usual customers, mind."

Victor: "You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?"
Gaspode: "I ain't just a pretty face."
Victor: "You aren't even a pretty face, Gaspode."

In the very front row of the Odium the Librarian stared up at the now-empty screen. It was the fourth time that afternoon he'd watched Shadow of the Dessert, because there's something about a 300lb orangutan that doesn't encourage people to order it out of the pit between houses.

Breaks in film weren't unusual. Bezam had spent many a flustered few minutes feverishly cutting and pasting while the audience cheerfully stamped its feet and high-spiritedly threw peanuts, knives, and double-headed axes at the screen.

Gaspode: "I heard once where there was this city that was so wicked that the gods turned it into a puddle of molten glass. And the only person who saw it happen was turned into a pillar of salt by day and a cheese shaker by night."
Victor: "Gosh. What had the people been doing?"
Gaspode: "Dunno. Prob'ly not much. It doesn't take much to annoy gods."

"What I don't understand," said Gaspode... "is how come we're descended from wolves. I mean, your average wolf, he's a bright bugger, know what I mean? Chock full of cunnin' an' like that. We're talking grey paws racing over the trackless tundra, is what I'm getting at. ... And suddenly a handful of generations later we've got Percy the Pup here with a cold nose, bright eyes, glossy coat and the brains of a stunned herring."

"It's a dog-eat-dog world out there. You think Dopey the Mutt there would last five minutes in Ankh-Morpork? He set one paw in some o' the streets, he's three sets of fur gloves an' Crispy Fried No. 27 at the nearest Klatchian all-night carry-out."

There's a lot of loose thinking about magic. People go around talking about mystic harmonies and cosmic balances and unicorns, all of which is to real magic what a glove puppet is to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Real magic is the hand around the bandsaw, the thrown spark in the powder keg, the dimension-warp linking you straight into the heart of a star, the flaming sword that burns all the way down to the pommel. Sooner juggle torches in a tar pit than mess with real magic. Sooner lie down in front of a thousand elephants.

At least, that's what wizards say, which is why they charge such swingingly huge fees for getting involved with the bloody stuff.

"Bits of cliff sliding down an' mysterious doors appearin'," said Gaspode, shaking his head. "That's a lot of boding. Let's go somewhere far away and really think about it, eh?"

Well, not actually forbidden. No-one had ever gone so far as forbidding it. Apart from anything else, in order to forbid it you'd have to know what it was, which was forbidden. But it definitely contained the sort of information which, once you knew it, you wish you hadn't.

The Necrotelicomnicon was written by a Klatchian necromancer known to the world as Achmed the Mad, although he preferred to be called Achmed the I Just Get These Headaches.

"...a Golden Warrior, who drove the Fiends back and saved the World, and said, Where the Gate is, There Am I Also; I am He that was Born of Holy Wood, to guard the Wild Idea. ... And they, not having been Born yesterday, and fearing the Cure more than the Malady, said to him, What will you Take from Us, that you will Guard the Door..."

It was just one of those usual "If you don't stop it you'll go blind" myths that civilisations tended to hand on to their descendants.

Azhural stood on a low hill, watching the sea of elephants move below him. ... A mile of veldt was being churned into a soggy mud wallow, bare of grass -- although, by the smell of it, it'd be the greenest patch on the Disc after the rains came.

Azhural raised his staff. "It's fifteen hundred miles to Ankh-Morpork," he said. "We've got three hundred and sixty-three elephants, fifty carts of forage, the monsoon's about to break and we're wearing ... we're wearing ... sort of things, like glass, only dark ... dark glass things on our eyes..."

An hour later the veldt in front of the low hill was deserted except for a billion flies and one dung beetle who couldn't believe his luck.

Anyone with a bit of intelligence and enough perseverance could do magic, which was why the wizards cloaked it with rituals and the whole pointy-hat business.

People who used magic without knowing what they were doing usually came to a sticky end.

Laddie could home in on young women who were being taken out for the evening by a hopeful swain and lay his head on their lap and give them such a soulful look that the swain would buy him a saucer of beer ... Gaspode had never been able to do that, because he was too short for laps and, anyway, got nothing but disgusted screams if he tried it.

"I mean, look at the start I had in life. Frone inna river inna sack. An actual sack. Dear little puppy dog opens his eyes, looks out in wonder at the world, style of fing, he's in this sack. For two weeks I thought the brick was my mother."

Gaspode [the dog] wondered how you went about mating with a wolf, and what happened to you when you stopped.

"Yeah, I know how it is," said the cat sympathetically. "People throwing old boots and things at you."

Cat shrugged. "Give me a boot every time. You know where you stand, with a boot."

Later Soll Dibbler said, "Look, Uncle, the Ankh-Morpork civil war -- great idea. No problem with that. Famous historical occurrence, no problem. It's just that none of the historians mentioned seeing any elephants."

"See?" said the cat. "Give them an opposed thumb and they think they're something special."

Not that dogs like me needs humans to feed 'em, I could be out bringing down reindeers just by leaping on their backs and bitin' their jugulars off, but it's damn convenient getting it all on a plate.

You didn't need any special mysterious animal instincts here. Perfectly generalised everyday instincts were enough to horrify him.

The universe contains any amount of horrible ways to be woken up, such as the noise of the mob breaking down the front door, the scream of fire engines, or the realisation that today is the Monday which on Friday night was a comfortably long way off. A dog's wet noise is not strictly speaking the worst of the bunch, but it has its own peculiar dreadfulness which conoisseurs of the ghastly and dog owners everywhere have come to know and dread. It's like having a small piece of defrosting liver pressed lovingly against you.

There was a pause while Silverfish read. It was quite a long one. Silverfish wasn't used to reading matter that didn't come in columns with totals at the bottom.

"You lay a finger on me and you'll never work in this town again!" shouted Silverfish.

"I got a job anyway, Mr. Silverfish," said Detritus calmly, carrying Silverfish towards the gate. "I'm Vice-President of Throwing Out People Mr Dibbler Doesn't like the Face of."

"There was sunnink I got to tell you. What was it, now? Oh, yeah. I remember. Your girlfriend is an agent of demonic powers. That night we saw her on the hill she was prob'ly on her way to commune with evil. What d'you fink of that, eh?"

"Look, just shut up a minute, will you?" said Victor, irritably. "I'm trying to hear what they're saying."

"Well, 'scuse me. I was jus' tryin' to save the world," muttered Gaspode. "If gharstely creatures from before the Dawna Time starts wavin' at you from under your bed, jus' you don't come complainin' to me,"

It would have been cheaper, Soll complained, to have risked the wrath of the wizards, sneaked some filming in Ankh-Morpork itself, and then slipped someone a fistful of dollars to put a match to the place.

Everyone else's eyes turned on him in the same way that spectators at the lion pit watch the first condemned criminal to be pushed out through the iron gate.

"I might not know how to behave, but at least I don't go mooning around over some girl who's letting dretful Creatures of the Night into the world."

Victor: "How do you know they're dreadful?"
Gaspode: "Put it like this. If something's shoved in a cave under a hill behind some great big doors, it's not 'cos people want it to come out every night to wash the dishes, is it?"

Perhaps he should just start up a conversation and wait until it got around naturally to monstrosities from Beyond the Void.

Soll: "But he's ideal for the role! It calls for a solid character--"
Ginger: "Solid? Of course he's solid! He's made of stone! He might have a suit of chain mail and a false moustache but he's still a troll!"
Rock: "Excuse me. I hope we're not going to get elementalist about this?"

"Now look here," said Rock, his voice winding up like a pitcher's arm. "What you're saying is, is okay for trolls to be shown bashing people with clubs, is not okay to show trolls have finer feelings like squashy humans?"

Dwarf: "Why is it all of Mr. Dibbler's films are set against the background of a world gone mad?"
Soll: "Because Mr. Dibbler is a very observant man."

Soll: "Ah. I see here a wounded Royalist soldier's last words are 'What I wouldn't give right now for a $1 Eat-Till-It-Hurts special at ... Harga's ... House ... of ... Ribs ... Mother!"
Dibbler: "I think it's very moving."

"I mean, Holy Wood is a different sort of place, isn't it? People act differently here. Everywhere else, the most important things are gods or money or cattle. Here, the most important thing is to be important."

Victor: "In the, uh, in the nowhere between the somewhere there are creatures which on the whole I'd rather not describe to you."
Ginger: "You already have."

Ginger: "Will you come to my room tonight? Please? You can wake me up if I start sleepwalking again."
Victor: "Well, er, yes, but your landlady might not like it--"
Ginger: "Oh, Mrs. Cosmopilite is very broadminded."
Victor: "She is?"
Ginger: "She'll just think we're having sex."

According to the history books, the decisive battle that ended the Ankh-Morpork Civil War was fought between two handfuls of bone-weary men in a swamp early one misty morning and, although one side claimed victory, ended with a practical score of Humans 0, ravens 1,000, which is the case with most battles.

"And I liked the motto," said Soll. "'Every (k)night is Gormay Night At Harga's House of Ribs.' If we had sound, I wonder what his battle cry would have been?"

The real [Ankh-Morpork] had been burned down many times in its long history -- out of revenge, or carelessness, or spite, or even just for the insurance. Most of the big stone buildings that actually made it a city, as opposed simply to a load of hovels all in one place, survived them intact and many people considered that a good fire every hundred years or so was essential to the health of the city since it helped to keep down the rats, roaches, flease and, of course, people not rich enough to live in stone houses.

It had been bad enough bumping into a grinning Mrs. Cosmopilite on the stairs. She had given him a big smile and a complicated, elbow-intensive gesture that, he felt certain, sweet little old ladies shouldn't know.

How did you wake up a sleepwalker, anyway? ... There were stories about people dreaming about being executed and then, when someone had touched them on the shoulder to wake them up, their heads had fallen off. How anyone ever knew what a dead person had been dreaming wasn't disclosed. Perhaps the ghost came back afterwards and stood at the end of the bed, complaining.

Someone was shouting, but politely, as if they wanted to be helped but only if it wouldn't be too much trouble.

Gaspode: "I bet Cohen the Barbarian isn't afraid of the dark."
Victor: "Well, yes--"
Gaspode: "And the Black Shadow of the Desert, he's not afraid of the dark either."
Victor: "Okay, but--"
Gaspode: "And Howondaland Smith, Balgrog Hunter, practic'ly eats the dark for his tea."
Victor: "Yes, but I'm not those people!"
Gaspode: "Try tellin' that to all the people who handed over their pennies to watch you bein' 'em."

"Messin' around with girls in thrall to Creatures from the Void never works out, take my word for it. You'd never know what you were going to wake up next to."

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

"He bloody intelligent dog," said another troll, idly kicking Gaspode aside. "I see him in click yesterday. He can play dead and count up to five."

"That two more than you can, then." This got a round of laughter. [Footnote: By troll standards, this was Oscar Wilde at his best.]

"Listen, you not allowed to eat people in Holy Wood. It get us bad name! Also Silicon Anti-Defamation League be down on you like a ton of rectangular building things."

Victor remembered being frightened of tigers when he was young. In vain did people point out that the nearest tiger was three thousand miles away. He'd say, "Is there any sea between where they live and here?" and people would say, "Well, no, but--" and he'd say, "Then it's just a matter of distance."

"You uncivilised troll," scolded Rock. "What you thinking of? You eat people, everyone laugh at you, say 'he very defective troll, do not know how to behave in polite company' and stop paying you three dollars a day and send you back to mountains."

Yetis are a high-altitude species of troll, and quite unaware that eating people is out of fashion. Their view is: if it moves, eat it. If it doesn't, then wait for it to move. And then eat it.

First Yeti: "My cousin said they was enormously grey animals. Elephants."
Second Yeti: "Bigger'n us?"
First Yeti: "Nearly as bigger'n us. Load of them, he said. More than he could count."
Second Yeti: "Yeah, well. Your cousin can't count above one."
First Yeti: "He said there was lots of ones."

The librarian had [a poster] pinned up in the fetid, book-lined nest he called home [Footnote: In fact he called it "oook". But probably, in translation, it meant "home".]

Dean: "I was saying that we didn't know the meaning of the word 'sex' when we were young."
Poons: "That's true. That's very true. Did we ever, mm, find out, do you remember?"

There are wheelchairs which are lightweight and built to let their owners function fully and independently in modern society. To the thing inhabited by Poons, they were as gazelles to a hippopotamus. Poons was well aware of his function in modern society, and as far as he was concerned it was to be pushed everywhere and generally pandered to.

The University sanitarium wasn't very big, and was seldom used. Wizards tended to be either in rude health, or dead. The only medicine they generally required was an antacid formula and a dark room until lunch.

Ginger: "One of them keeps bouncing up and down in his wheelchair and shouting things like 'Way-hey!' and 'Whoop-whoop!' and 'Hubba-hubba!'"
Victor: "That's the oldest wizard in the world."
Ginger: "Good grief! What was he like fifty years ago?"
Victor: "Well, for one thing, he was eighty."

Map-making had never been a precise art on the Discworld. People tended to start off with good intentions and then get so carried away with the spouting whales, monsters, waves, and other twiddly bits of cartographic furniture that they often forgot to put the boring mountains and rivers in at all.

As far as wizards were concerned, paying to get into anything was something that happened to other people.

An inviolable rule about buildings for the showing of moving pictures, applicable throughout the multiverse, is that the ghastliness of the architecture around the back is inversely proportional to the gloriousness of the architecture in the front. At the front: pillars, arches, gold leaf, lights. At the back: weird ducts, mysterious prolapses of pipework, blank walls, fetid alleys.

It occurred to him that this was an extremely dangerous thing and he might probably have to have someone killed one day, although it would be with reluctance. [Footnote:On his part, that is. Their reluctance probably goes without saying.]

Dibbler: "Whatever happened to integrity round here?"
Soll: "I think you probably sold it to someone, Uncle."

With a clanking and the hiss of desperately escaping air, Bezam's daughter Calliope rose slowly out of the floor, attacking the keys on a small pipe with all the verve of several hours' practice and the combined efforts of two strong trolls working the bellows behind the scenes. She was a beefy young woman and, whatever piece of music she was playing, it was definitely losing.

Dean: "Have a chocolate-covered raisin."
Chair: "They look like rat droppings."
Dean: "So that's it. The bag fell on the floor a minute ago, and I thought there seemed rather a lot."

Calliope peered intently at the score in front of her, rolled up her sleeves, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and launched a spirited attack on what was just discernable as the old Ankh-Morporkian civil anthem. [Footnote: "We Can Rule You Wholesale".]

Books wouldn't do it. Even ordinary theater wouldn't do it, because in your heart you knew it was just people in funny clothes on a stage. But Holy Wood went straight from the eye into the brain. In your heart you thought it was real.

Ginger: "What're you going to do?"
Victor: "There are some Things that a man has to do by himself."
Ginger: "What? What? Do you want to go to the lavatory or something?"

"My dear sir, we didn't start meddling with things best left--" the Chair hesitated in mid-snarl, "unmeddled-with with," he finished lamely.

Dibbler hesitated. The excitement was unhinging him a little. "Well," he said, "I suppose he should know."

They weren't looking at him as if he was their only hope. They were looking at him as if he was their certainty.

Ordinary magic just moved things around. It couldn't create a real thing that'd last for more than a second, because that took a lot of power.

But Holy Wood easily created things over and over again, dozens of times a second. They didn't have to last for long. It just had to last for long enough.

The Librarian had seen many weird things in his time, but that had to be the 57th strangest. [Footnote: he had a tidy mind]

"Aaaarghhhh." This was the noise made as he missed the lurching Thing by several meters and was realising that, if you have tied a rope to the top of a very high and extremely solid stone tower and are now swinging towards it, failing to hit something on the way is an error which you will regret for the rest of your truncated life.

"I don't know how you go about blowing up a fifty-foot woman. It's not the sort of thing I've ever been called upon to do."

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.

Victor heard a distant "If it bleeds, we can kill it!" followed by "What do you mean, we?"

Ponder: "What happened?"
Dean: "A fifty-foot monster fell on you. Are you, er, all right?"

Librarian: "Oook. Oook!"
Victor: "He says you're probably descended from the original High Priestess. He thinks everyone in Holy Wood is descended from ... you see ... I mean, the first time the Things broke through the entire city was destroyed and the survivors fled everywhere, you see, but everyone has this was of remembering even things that happened to their ancestors. I mean, it's like there's this great big pool of memory and we're linked up to it and when it all started happening again we were all called to the place, and you tried to put it right, only it was weak so it couldn't get through to you unless you were asleep--"
Ginger: "'Oook'? You got all this from 'oook'?"
Victor: "Well, not just one."

There were untouched or half-eaten meals on almost every table. This wasn't particularly unusual at Borgle's, but normally they were accompanied by people complaining bitterly.

[Detritus] paid them no attention at all. He had other fish to fry. [Footnote: The trollish phrase is, "Other maddened grizzly bears to stun."]

Being trampled almost to death by a preoccupied troll is almost the ideal cure for a person confused about what is real and what isn't. Reality is something walking heavily up your spine.

Seeing the shapes on the screen clearly, without the cushion of hypnosis, was enough to make anything brainier than Detritus have a sudden urge to be a long way away.

Victor: "We have to be the last ones out. It's all part of Holy Wood. You can use the magic, but it uses you, too. Besides, don't you want to see how it all ends?"
Ginger: "I had rather hoped to see how it all ends from a long way off."

If Ruby had lrearned anything in Holy Wood, it was that there was no use in waiting around for Mr. Right to hit you with a brick.

"I want to make this absolutely clear, right? One more, and I really mean it, one more, right? just one more Hihohiho out of you bloody lawn ornaments and it's double-headed axe time, okay? We're dwarfs, godsdammit. So act like them. And that includes you, Dozy!"

Huge grey foreheads were becoming visible in the dust. There was also the very distinctive smell you get when a thousand elephants have been foraging for days in cabbage fields.

Nobby: "Looks like -- would you say it was a thousand elephants, Sarge?"
Colon: "Yeah. About a thousand, I'd say."
Nobby: "Thought it looked about a thousand."
Colon: "Man down there says Throat ordered 'em."
Nobby: "Get away? he's going into this Jumbo Sausage thing in a big way, then?"

Somewhere in the distant mountains, wolves were howling. Somewhere in friendly houses, dogs with collars and dishes with their names on were being patted on the head.

Somewhere in between, and feeling oddly cheerful about it, Gaspode the Wonder Dog limped into the gloriously-monochrome sunset.

Moving Pictures

Summary

Quotes