Moving pictures

'Prob'ly all the writing's goin' on about what a great guy he was when he was alive,' said Gaspode knowledgeably. 'You know, 'Slayer of thousands' stuff. Prob'ly he left a lot of money for priests to say prayers and light candles and sacrifice goats and stuff. There used to be a lot of that sort of thing. You know, you'd get dese guys whorin' and drinkin' and carryin' on regardless their whole life, and then when the old Grim Reaper starts sharpenin' his scythe they suddenly becomes all pious and pays a lot of priests to give their soul a quick wash-and-brush-up and gen'rally keep on tellin' the gods what a decent chap they was.'

'Gaspode?' said Victor levelly.

'What?'

'You were a performing dog. How come you know all this stuff?'

'I ain't just a pretty face.'

'You aren't even a pretty face, Gaspode.'

The little dog shrugged. 'I've always had eyes and ears,' he said. 'You'd be amazed, the stuff you see and hear when you're a dog. I dint know what any of it meant at the time, of course. Now I do.'

Victor stared at the pages again. There certainly was a figure which, if you half-closed your eyes, looked very much like a statue of a knight with his hands resting on his sword.

'It might not mean a man,' he said. 'Pictographic writing doesn't work like that.

It's all down to context, you see.' He racked his brains to think of some of the books he'd seen.

'For example, in the Agatean language the signs for 'woman' and 'slave' written down together actually mean 'wife'.'

He looked closely at the page. The dead man or the sleeping man, or the standing man resting his hands on his sword, the figure was so stylized it was hard to be sure seemed to appear beside another common picture. He ran his finger along the line of pictograms.

'See,' he said, 'it could be the man figure is only part of a word. See? It's always to the right of this other picture, which looks a bit like a bit like a doorway, or something.

So it might really mean-'he hesitated.' 'Doorway/man',' he hazarded.

He turned the book slightly.

'Could be some old king,' said Gaspode. 'Could mean something like The Man with the Sword is Imprisoned, or something. Or maybe it means Watch Out, There's a Man with a Sword behind the Door. Could mean anything, really.'

Victor squinted at the book again. 'It's funny,' he said. 'It doesn't look dead. Just . . . not alive. Waiting to be alive? A waiting man with a sword?'

Victor peered at the little man-figure. It had hardly any features, but still managed to look vaguely familiar.

'You know,' he said, 'it looks just like my Uncle Osric . . .'

Clickaclickaclicka. Click.

The film spun to a standstill. There was a thunder of applause, a stamping of feet and a barrage of empty banged grain bags.

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. A drift of peanut shells and screwed up paper bags lay around his feet.

The Librarian loved the clicks. They spoke to something in his soul. He'd even started writing a story which he thought would make a very good moving picture. [18] Everyone he showed it to said it was jolly good, often even before they'd read it.

But something about this click was worrying him. He'd sat through it four times, and he was still worried.

He eased himself out of the three seats he was occupying and knuckled his way up the aisle and into the little room where Bezam was rewinding the film.

Bezam looked up as the door opened.

'Get out-' he began, and then grinned desperately and said, 'Hallo, sir. Pretty good click, eh?