And the stars jumped, and settled, jumped, and settled …
As she swooped upward Esk tried to concentrate on everyday things, because if she let her mind dwell on precisely what it was she was following then she knew she would turn back, and she wasn’t sure she knew the way. She tried to remember the eighteen herbs that cured ear-ache, which kept her occupied for a while because she could never recall the last four.
A star swooped past, and then was violently jerked away; it was about twenty feet across.
When she ran out of herbs she started on the diseases of goats, which took quite a long time because goats can catch a lot of things that cows can catch plus a lot of things that sheep catch plus a complete range of horrible ailments of their very own. When she had finished listing wooden udder, ear wilt and the octarine garget she tried to recall the complex code of dots and lines that they used to cut in the trees around Bad Ass, so that lost villagers could find their way home on snowy nights.
She was as far as dot dot dot dash dot dash (Hubby-Turnwise, one mile from the village) when the universe around her vanished with a faint pop. She fell forward, hit something hard and gritty and rolled to a halt.
The grittiness was sand. Fine, dry, cold sand. You could tell that even if you dug down several feet it would be just as cold and just as dry.
Esk lay with her face in it for a moment, summoning the courage to look up. She could just see, a few feet away from her, the hem of someone’s dress. Something’s dress, she corrected herself. Unless it was a wing. It could be a wing, a particularly tatty and leathery one.
Her eyes followed it up until she found a face, higher than a house, outlined against the starry sky. Its owner was obviously trying to look nightmarish, but had tried too hard. The basic appearance was that of a chicken that had been dead for about two months, but the unpleasant effect was rather spoiled by warthog tusks, moth antennae, wolf ears and a unicorn spike. The whole thing had a self-assembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn’t quite get to grips with the idea.
It was staring, but not at her. Something behind her occupied all its interest. Esk turned her head very slowly.
Simon was sitting cross-legged in the centre of a circle of Things. There were hundreds of them, as still and silent as statues, watching him with reptilian patience.
There was something small and angular held in his cupped hands. It gave off a fuzzy blue light that made his face look strange.
Other shapes lay on the ground beside him, each in its little soft glow. They were the regular sort of shapes that Granny dismissed airily as jommetry — cubes, many-sided diamonds, cones, even a globe. Each one was transparent and inside was…
Esk edged closer. No-one was taking any notice of her.
Inside a crystal sphere that had been tossed aside on to the sand floated a blue-green ball, crisscrossed with tiny white cloud patterns and what could almost have been continents if anyone was silly enough to try to live on a ball. It might have been a sort of model, except something about its glow told Esk that it was quite real and probably very big and not — in every sense — totally inside the sphere.
She put it down very gently and sidled over to a ten-sided block in which floated a much more acceptable world. It was properly disc-shaped, but instead of the Rimfall there was a wall of ice and instead of the Hub there was a gigantic tree, so big that its roots merged into mountain ranges.
A prism beside it held another slowly-turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake — a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail.
Esk turned the prism over and over curiously, noticing how the little disc inside stayed resolutely upright.
Simon giggled softly. Esk replaced the snake-disc and peered carefully over his shoulder.
He was holding a small glass pyramid. There were stars in it, and occasionally he would give it a little shake so that the stars swirled up like snow in the wind, and then settled back in their places. Then he would giggle.
And beyond the stars…
It was the Discworld. Great A’Tuin no bigger than a small saucer toiled along under a world that looked like the work of an obsessive jeweller.
Jiggle, swirl. Jiggle, swirl, giggle. There were already hairline cracks in the glass.
Esk looked at Simon’s blank eyes and then up into the hungry faces of the nearest Things, and then she reached across and pulled the pyramid out of his hands and turned and ran.
The Things didn’t stir as she scurried towards them, bent almost double, with the pyramid clasped tightly to her chest. But suddenly her feet were no longer running over the sand and she was being lifted into the frigid air, and a Thing with a face like a drowned rabbit turned slowly towards her and extended a talon.
You’re not really here, Esk told herself. It’s only a sort of a dream, what Granny calls an annaloggy. You can’t really be hurt, it’s all imagination. There’s absolutely no harm that can come to you, it’s all really inside your mind.
I wonder if it knows that?
The talon picked her out of the air and the rabbit face split like a banana skin. There was no mouth, just a dark hole, as if the Thing was itself an opening to an even worse dimension, a place by comparison with which freezing sand and moonless moonlight would be a jolly afternoon at the seaside.
Esk held the Disc-pyramid and flailed with her free hand at the claw around her. It had no effect. The darkness loomed over her, a gateway to total oblivion.
She kicked it as hard as she could.
Which was not, given the circumstances, very hard. But where her foot struck there was an explosion of white sparks and a pop — which would have been a much more satisfying bang if the thin air here didn’t suck the sound away.
The Thing screeched like a chainsaw encountering, deep inside an unsuspecting sapling, a lurking and long-forgotten nail. The others around it set up a sympathetic buzzing.
Esk kicked again and the Thing shrieked and dropped her to the sand. She was bright enough to roll, with the tiny world hugged protectively to her, because even in a dream a broken ankle can be painful.
The Thing lurched uncertainly above her. Esk’s eyes narrowed. She put the world down very carefully, hit the Thing very hard around the point where its shins would be, if there were shins under that cloak, and picked up the world again in one neat movement.
The creature howled, bent double, and then toppled slowly, like a sackful of coathangers. When it hit the ground it collapsed into a mass of disjointed limbs; the head rolled away and rocked to a standstill.
Is that all? thought Esk. They can hardly walk, even! When you hit them they just fall over!
The nearest Things chittered and tried to back away as she marched determinedly towards them, but since their bodies seemed to be held together more or less by wishful thinking they weren’t very good at it. She hit one, which had a face like a small family of squid, and it deflated into a pile of twitching bones and bits of fur and odd ends of tentacle, very much like a Greek meal. Another was slightly more successful and had begun to shamble uncertainly away before Esk caught it a crack on one of its five shins.
It flailed desperately as it fell and brought down another two.
By then the others had managed to lurch out of her way and stood watching from a distance.
Esk took a few steps towards the nearest one. It tried to move away, and fell over.
They may have been ugly. They may have been evil. But when it came to poetry in motion, the Things had all the grace and co-ordination of a deck-chair.