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 coordination of a deck-chair.
Esk glared at them, and took a look at the Disc in its glass pyramid. All the excitement didn’t seem to have disturbed it a bit.
She’d been able to get out, if this indeed was out and if the Disc could be said to be in. But how was one supposed to get back?
Somebody laughed. It was the sort of laugh
Basically, it was p’ch’zarni’chiwkov. This epiglottis-throttling word is seldom used on the Disc except by highly-paid stunt linguists and, of course, the tiny tribe of the K’turni, who invented it. It has no direct synonym, although the Cumhoolie word “squemt” (‘the feeling upon finding that the previous occupant of the privy has used all the paper’) begins to approach it in general depth of feeling. The closest translation is as follows:
The nasty little sound of a sword being unsheathed right behind one at just the point when one thought one had disposed of one’s enemies.
Although K’tumi speakers say that this does not convey the cold sweating, heart-stopping, gut-freezing sense of the original.
It was that kind of laugh.
Esk turned around slowly. Simon drifted towards her across the sand, with his hands cupped in front of him. His eyes were tight shut.
“Did you really think it would be as easy as that? ” he said. Or something said; it didn’t sound like Simon’s voice, but like dozens of voices speaking’at once.
“Simon?” she said, uncertainly.
“He is of no further use to us,” said the Thing with Simon’s shape. “He has shown us the way, child. Now give us our property.”
Esk backed away.
“I don’t think it belongs to you,” she said, “whoever you are.”
The face in front of her opened its eyes. There was nothing there but blackness – not a colour, just holes into some other space.
“We could say that if you gave it to us we would be merciful. We could say we would let you go from here in your own shape. But there wouldn’t really be much point in us saying that, would there?”
“I wouldn’t believe you,” said Esk.
“Well, then.”
The Simon-thing grinned.
“You’re only putting off the inevitable,” it said.
“Suits me.”
“We could take it anyway.”
“Take it, then. But I don’t think you can. You can’t take anything unless it’s given to you, can you?”
They circled round.
“You’ll give it to us,” said the Simon-thing.
Some of the other Things were approaching now, striding back across the desert with horrible jerky motions.
“You’ll get tired,” it continued. “We can wait. We’re very good at waiting.”
It made a feint to the left, but Esk swung around to face it.
“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “I’m only dreaming this, and you can’t get hurt in dreams.”
The Thing paused, and looked at her with its empty eyes.
“Have you got a word in your world, I think it’s called ‘psychosomatic’?”
“Never heard of it,” snapped Esk.
“It means you can get hurt in your dreams. And what is so interesting is that if you die in your dreams you stay here. That would be niiiiice.”
Esk glanced sideways at the distant mountains, sprawled on the chilly horizon like melted mud pies. There were no trees, not even any rocks. Just sand and cold stars and
She felt the movement rather than heard it and turned with the pyramid held between her hands like a club. It hit the Simon-thing in mid-leap with a satisfying thump, but as soon as it hit the ground it somersaulted forward and bounced upright with unpleasant ease. But it had heard her gasp and had seen the brief pain in her eyes. It paused.
“Ah, that hurt you, Did it not? You don’t like to see another one suffer, yes? Not this one, it seems.”
It turned and beckoned, and two of the tall Things lurched over to it and gripped it firmly by the arms.
Its eyes changed. The darkness faded, and then Simon’s own eyes looked out of his face. He stared up at the Things on either side of him and struggled briefly, but one had several pairs of tentacles wrapped around his wrist and the other was holding his arm in the world’s largest lobster claw.
Then he saw Esk, and his eyes fell to the little glass pyramid.
“Run away!” he hissed. “Take it away from here! Don’t let them get it!” He grimaced as the claw tightened on his arm.
“Is this a trick?” said Esk. “Who are you really?”
“Don’t you recognise me?” he said wretchedly. “What are you doing in my dream?”
“If this is a dream then I’d like to wake up, please,” said Esk.
“Listen. You must run away now, do you understand? Don’t stand there with your mouth open.”
GIVE IT To us, said a cold voice inside Esk’s head.
Esk looked down at the glass pyramid with its unconcerned little world and stared up at Simon, her mouth an O of puzzlement.
“But what is it?”
“Look hard at it!”
Esk peered through the glass. If she squinted it seemed that the little Disc was granular, as if it was made up of millions of tiny specks. If she looked hard at the specks
“It’s just numbers!” she said. “The whole world – it’s all made up of numbers . . . .”
“It’s not the world, it’s an idea of the world,” said Simon. “I created it for them. They can’t get through to us, do you see, but ideas have got a shape here. Ideas are real!”
GIVE IT TO US.
“But ideas can’t hurt anyone!”
“I turned things into numbers to understand them, but they just want to control,” Simon said bitterly. “They burrowed into my numbers like -”
He screamed.
GIVE IT TO US OR WE WILL TAKE HIM TO BITS.
Esk looked up at the nearest nightmare face.
“How do I know I can trust you?” she said.
YOU CAN’T TRUST US. BUT YOU HAVE NO CHOICE.
Esk looked at the ring of faces that not even a necrophile could love, faces put together from a fishmonger’s midden, faces picked randomly from things that lurked in deep ocean holes and haunted caves, faces that were not human enough to gloat or leer but had all the menace of a suspiciously v-shaped ripple near an incautious bather.
She couldn’t trust them. But she had no choice.
Something else was happening, in a place as far away as the thickness of a shadow.