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millennia more and more vermine were descendants of those vermine who, when faced with a cliff edge, squeaked the rodent equivalent of Blow that for a Game of Soldiers. Vermine now abseil down cliffs, and build small boats to cross lakes. When their rush leads them to the seashore they sit around avoiding one another’s gaze for a while, and then leave early to get home before the rush.
third wave was already crunching and smashing its way over the top of them. Except that you couldn’t use the word “trying”. It suggested some sort of conscious effort, some sort of possibility that there might also be a state of ‘not trying’. Something about the relentless movement, the way they crushed one another in their surge, suggested that the wire baskets had as much choice in the matter as water has about flowing downhill.
‘Yo!’ shouted the Dean. Raw magic smacked into the grinding tangle of metal. It rained wheels.
‘Eat hot thaumaturgy, you m-,’ the Dean began.
‘Don’t swear! Don’t swear!’ shouted Ridcully above the noise. He tried to swat a Silly Bugger that was orbiting his hat.‘There’s no telling what it might turn into!’
‘Bother!’ screamed the Dean.
‘It’s no good. We might as well be trying to hold back the sea,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘I vote we head back to the University and pick up some really tough spells.’
‘Good idea,’ said Ridcully. He looked up at the advancing wall of twisted wire. ‘Any idea how?’ he said.
‘Yo! Scallywags!’ said the Dean. He aimed his staff again. It made a sad little noise that, if it was written down, could only be spelled pfffft. A feeble spark fell off the end and on to the cobbles.
Windle Poons slammed another book shut. The Librarian winced.
‘Nothing! Volcanoes, tidal waves, wrath of gods, meddling wizards … I don’t want to know how other cities have been killed, I want to know how they ended …’
The Librarian stacked another pile of books on the reading desk. Another plus about being dead, Windle was finding, was an ability with languages. He could
see the sense in the words without knowing the actual meaning. Being dead wasn’t like falling asleep after all. It was like waking up.
He glanced across the Library to where Lupine was having his paw bandaged.
‘Librarian?’ he said softly.
‘Oook?’
‘You’ve changed species in your time … what would you do if, for the sake of argument, you found a couple of people who … well, suppose there was a wolf that changed into a wolfman at the full moon, and a woman that changed into a wolfwoman at the full moon … you know, approaching the same shape but from opposite directions? And they’d met. What do you tell them? Do you let them sort it out for themselves?’
‘Oook, ‘ said the Librarian, instantly.
‘It’s tempting.’
‘Oook.’
‘Mrs Cake wouldn’t like it, though.’
‘Eeek oook.’
‘You’re right. You could have put it a little less coarsely, but you’re right. Everyone has to sort things out for themselves.’
He sighed, and turned the page. His eyes widened.
‘The city of Kahn Li,’ he said. ‘Ever heard of it? What’s this book? “Stripfettle’s Believe-It-Or-Not Grimoire.” Says here … “little carts … none knew from where they came … of such great use, men were employed to herd them and bring them into the city … of a sudden, like unto a rush of creatures … men followed them and behold, there was a new city outside the walls, a city as of merchants’ booths wherein the carts ran” …’
He turned the page.
‘It seems to say …’
I still haven’t understood it properly, he told himself. One-Man-Bucket thinks we’re talking
about the breeding of cities. But that doesn’t feel right.
A city is alive. Supposing you were a great slow giant, like a Counting Pine, and looked down at a city?
You’d see buildings grow; you’d see attackers driven off; you’d see fires put out. You’d see the city was alive but you wouldn’t see people, because they’d move too fast. The life of a city, the thing that drives it, isn’t some sort of mysterious force. The life of a city is people.
He turned the pages absently, not really looking …
So we have the cities – big, sedentary creatures, growing from one spot and hardly moving at all for thousands of years. They breed by sending out people to colonise new land. They themselves just lie there. They’re alive, but only in the same way that a jelly fish is alive. Or a fairly bright vegetable. After all, we call Ankh-Morpork the Big Wahooni …
And where you get big slow living things, you get small fast things that eat them …
Windle Poons felt the brain cells firing. Connections were made. Thought gushed along new channels. Had he ever really thought properly when he was alive? He doubted it. He’d just been a lot of complicated reactions attached to a lot of nerve endings, with everything from idle rumination about the next meal to random, distracting memories getting between him and real thought.
It’d grow inside the city, where it’s warm and protected. And then it’d break out, outside the city, and build … something, not a real city, a false city … that pulls the people, the life, out of the host …
The word we’re looking for here is predator.
The Dean stared at his staff in disbelief. He gave it a shake, and aimed it again.
This time the sound would be spelled pfwt.
He looked up. A curling wave of trolleys, rooftop high, was poised to fall on him.
‘Oh … shucks,’ he said, and folded his arms over his head.
Someone grabbed the back of his robe and pulled him away as the trolleys crashed down.
‘Come on,’ said Ridcully. ‘If we run we can keep ahead of ‘em.’
‘I’m out of magic! I’m out of magic!’ moaned the Dean.
‘You’ll be out of a lot more if you don’t hurry, ‘ said the Archchancellor.
Trying to keep together, bumping into one another, the wizards staggered ahead of the trolleys. Streams of them were surging out of the city and across the fields.
‘Know what this reminds me of?’ said Ridcully, as they fought their way through.
‘Do tell, ‘ muttered the Senior Wrangler.
‘Salmon run, ‘ said the Archchancellor.
‘What?’
‘Not in the Ankh, of course,’ said Ridcully.‘I don’t reckon a salmon could get upstream in our river – ‘
‘Unless it walked,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘- but I’ve seen ‘em thick as milk in some rivers,’ said Ridcully. ‘Fightin ‘ to get ahead. The whole river just a mass of silver.’
‘Fine, fine,’ said the Senior Wrangler. ‘What’d they do that for?’
‘Well … it’s all to do with breeding.’
‘Disgusting. And to think we have to drink water,’ said the Senior Wrangler.
‘Right, we’re in the open now, this is where we out-flank ‘em,’ said Ridcully. ‘We’ll just aim for a clear space and – ‘
‘I don’t think so,’ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
Every direction was filled with an advancing, grinding, fighting wall of trolleys.
‘They’re coming to get us ! They’re coming to get us !’ wailed the Bursar. The Dean snatched his staff.
‘Hey, that’s mine!’
The Dean pushed him away and blew off the wheels of a leading trolley.
‘That’s my staff!’
The wizards stood back to back in a narrowing ring of metal.
‘They’re not right for this city, ‘ said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
‘I know what you mean, ‘ said Ridcully. ‘Alien.’
‘I suppose no-one’s got a flying spell on them today?’ the Senior Wrangler enquired.
The Dean took aim again and melted a basket.
‘That’s my staff you’re using, you know.’
‘Shut up, Bursar,’ said the Archchancellor. ‘And, Dean, you’re getting nowhere picking them off one by one like that. OK, lads? We want to do them all as much damage as possible. Remember – wild, uncontrolled bursts …’
The trolleys advanced.
Ow. Ow.
Miss Flitworth staggered through the wet, rattling gloom. Hailstones crunched underfoot. Thunder cannonaded around the sky.
‘They sting, don’t they,’ she said.
THEY ECHO.
Bill Door fielded a stook as it was blown past, and stacked it with the others. Miss Flitworth scuttled past him, bent double under a load of corn.* The two of them worked steadily, crisscrossing the field in the teeth of the storm to snatch up the harvest before the wind and hail stole it away. Lightning flickered around the sky. It wasn’t a normal storm. It was war.
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* The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.
‘It’s going to pour with rain in a minute.’ screamed Miss Flitworth, above the noise. ‘We’ll never get it down to the barn! Go and fetch a tarpaulin or something! That’ll do for tonight!’