Moving Pictures

The only person not terrified of the ghastly man was old Windle Poons, who was one hundred and thirty years old and deaf and, while an expert on ancient magical writings, needed adequate notice and a good run-up to deal with the present day. He’d managed to absorb the fact that the new Archchancellor was going to be one of those hedgerow-and-dickie-bird chappies, it would take a week or two for him to grasp the change of events, and in the meantime he made polite and civilized conversation based on what little he could remember about Nature and things.

On the lines of:

‘I expect it must be a, mm, a change for you, mm, sleeping in a real bed, instead of under the, mm, stars?’ And: ‘These things, mm, here, are called knives and forks, mm.’ And: ‘This, mm, green stuff on the scrambled egg, mm, would it be parsley, do you think?’

But 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.

Anyway, the Bursar had other problems.

The Alchemists, for one thing. You couldn’t trust alchemists. They were too serious-minded.

Boom.

And that was the last one. 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.

It was midnight. The surf boomed on the beach, and made a phosphorescent glow in the night. Around the ancient hill, though, the sound seemed as dead as if it was arriving through several layers of velvet.

The hole in the sand was quite big now.

If you could put your ear to it, you might think you could hear applause.

It was still midnight. 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’ Guildhall was new. It was always new. It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.

On this night a number of muffled figures entered the building in a surreptitious fashion. After a few minutes the lights in a window on the top floor dimmed and went out.

Well, nearly out.

Something was happening up there. A strange flickering filled the window, very briefly. It was followed by a ragged cheering.

And there was a noise. Not a bang this time, but a strange mechanical purring, like a happy cat at the bottom of a tin drum.

It went clickaclickaclickaclicka … click.

It went on for several minutes, to a background of cheers. And then a voice said:

‘That’s all, folks.’^{6}

‘That’s all what?’ said the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, next morning.

The man in front of him shivered with fear.

‘Don’t know, lordship,’ he said. ‘They wouldn’t let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.’

He twisted his fingers together nervously. The Patrician’s stare had him pinned. It was a good stare, and one of the things it was good at was making people go on talking when they thought they had finished.

Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists’ Guild. He had once 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.[3]

‘That’s all, lordship,’ he whined. ‘There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.’

‘Wrong? How?’

‘Er. Dunno, sir. Just wrong, they said. They ought to go somewhere where it was better, they said. Uh. And they told me to go and get them some food.’

The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘But they’d had their supper only fifteen minutes before,’ the servant blurted out.

‘Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,’ said the Patrician.

‘Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.’

‘Indeed.’ 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.