Moving pictures

The air seemed to glitter.

'What's this place called?' said Lully, eventually.

'Don't know what it was called in the old days,' said Silverfish, leaning back and pulling the banged grains towards him. 'These days they call it the Holy Wood.'

'Holy Wood,' said Lully. 'Sounds ... familiar.' There was another silence while they thought about it.

It was broken by Sendivoge.

'Oh, well,' he said cheerfully, 'Holy Wood, here we come.'

'Yeah,' said Silverfish, shaking his head as if to dislodge a disquieting thought. 'Funny thing, really. I've got. this feeling ... that we've been going there ... all this time.'

Several thousand miles under Silverfish, Great A'Tuin the world turtle sculled dreamily on through the starry night.

Reality is a curve.That's not the problem. The problem is that there isn't as much as there should be. According to some of the more mystical texts in the stacks of the library of Unseen University

- the Discworld's premier college of wizardry and big dinners, whose collection of books is so massive that it distorts Space and Time -

- at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.

Outside the boundaries of the universes lie the raw realities, the couldhave-beens, the might-bes, the neverweres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.

Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in.

And reality leaks out.

The effect is like one of those deep-sea geysers of hot water, around which strange submarine creatures find enough warmth and food to make a brief, tiny oasis of existence in an environment where there shouldn't be any existence at all.

The idea of Holy Wood leaked innocently and joyfully into the Discworld.

And reality leaked out.

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. They began to gather.

A storm slid in across the sand dunes but, where it reached the low hill, the clouds seemed to curve away. Only a few drops of rain hit the parched soil, and the gale became nothing more than a faint breeze.

It blew sand over the long-dead remains of afire.

Further down the slope, near a hole that was now big enough for, say, a badger, a small rock dislodged itself and rolled away.

A month went by quickly. It didn't want to hang around.

The Bursar knocked respectfully at the Archchancellor's door and then opened it.

A crossbow bolt nailed his hat to the woodwork.

The Archchancellor lowered the bow and glared at him.

'Bloody dangerous thing to do, wasn't it?' he said. 'You could have caused a nasty