Even with the storm stalking the hills, the square itself was hushed. The ticking of the clock in its tower, unnoticeable at midday, now seemed to echo off the buildings.
As they approached, something whirred deep in its cogwheeled innards. The minute hand moved with a clonk, and shuddered to a halt on the 9. A trapdoor opened in the clock face and two little mechanical figures whirred
out self-importantly and tapped a small bell with great apparent effort.
Ting-ting-ling.
The figures lined up and wobbled back into the clock.
‘They’ve been there ever since I was a girl. Mr Simnel’s great-great-grandad made them,’ said Miss Flitworth. ‘l always wondered what they did between chimes, you know. I thought they had a little house in there, or something.’
I DON’T THINK SO. THEY’RE JUST A THING. THEY’RE NOT ALIVE.
‘Hmm. Well, they’ve been there for hundreds of years. Maybe life is something you sort of acquire?’
YES.
They waited in silence, except for the occasional thud as the minute hand climbed the night.
‘It’s been quite nice having you around the place, Bill Door.’
He didn’t reply.
‘Helping me with the harvest and everything.’
IT WAS … INTERESTING.
‘It was wrong of me to delay you, just for a lot of corn.’
NO. THE HARVEST IS IMPORTANT.
Bill Door unfolded his palm. The timer appeared.
‘I still can’t work out how you do that.’
IT IS NOT DIFFICULT.
The hiss of the sand grew until it filled the square.
‘Have you got any last words?’
YES. I DON’T WANT TO GO.
‘Well. Succinct, anyway.’
Bill Door was amazed to find she was trying to hold his hand.
Above him. the hands of midnight came together. There was a whirring from the clock. The door opened. The automata marched out. They clicked to a halt on either side of the hour bell, bowed to one another, and raised their hammers.
Dong.
And then there was the sound of a horse trotting.
Miss Flitworth found the edge of her vision filling with purple and blue blotches, like the flashes of after-image with no image to come after.
If she jerked her head quickly and peered out of the tail of her eye, she could see small greyclad shapes hovering around the walls.
The Revenooers, she thought. They’ve come to make sure it all happens.
‘Bill?’ she said.
He closed his palm over the gold timer.
NOW IT STARTS.
The hoofbeats grew louder, and echoed off the buildings behind them.
REMEMBER: YOU ARE IN NO DANGER.
Bill Door stepped back into the gloom.
Then he reappeared momentarily.
PROBABLY, he added, and retreated into the darkness.
Miss Flitworth sat down on the steps of the clock, cradling the body of the girl across her knees.
‘Bill?’ she ventured.
A mounted figure rode into the square.
It was, indeed. on a skeletal horse. Blue flame crackled over the creature’s bones as it trotted forward; Miss Flitworth found herself wondering whether it was a real skeleton, animated in some way, something that had once been the inside of a horse, or a skeletal creature in its own right. It was a ridiculous chain of thought to follow, but it was better than dwelling on the ghastly reality that was approaching.
Did it get rubbed down, or just given a good polish?
Its rider dismounted. It was much taller than Bill Door had been, but the darkness of its robe hid any details; It held something that wasn’t exactly a scythe but which might have had a scythe in its ancestry. in the same way that even the most cunningly-fashioned surgical implement has a stick somewhere in its past. It was a long way from any implement that ever touched a straw.
The figure stalked towards Miss Flitworth, scythe
over its shoulder, and stopped.
Where is He?
‘Don’t know who you’re talking about,’ said Miss Flitworth. ‘And if I was you, young man, I’d feed my horse.’
The figure appeared to have trouble digesting this information, but finally it seemed to reach a conclusion. It unshipped the scythe and looked down at the child.
I will find Him, it said. But first –
It stiffened.
A voice behind it said:
DROP THE SCYTHE. AND TURN AROUND SLOWLY.
Something within the city, Windle thought. Cities grow up full of people, but they’re also full of commerce and shops and religions and …
This is stupid, he told himself. They’re just things. They’re not alive.
Maybe life is something you acquire.
Parasites and predators, but not like the sort affecting animals and vegetables. They were some kind of big, slower, metaphorical lifeform, living off cities.
But they incubate in the cities, like those, what are they? those icky newman wasp things. He could remember now, just as he could remember everything, reading as a student about creatures that laid their eggs inside other creatures. For months after he’d refused omelettes and caviar, just in case.
And the eggs would … look like the city, in a way, so that citizens would carry them home. Like cuckoo eggs.
I wonder how many cities died in the past? Ringed by parasites, like a coral reef surrounded by starfish.
They’d just become empty, they’d lose whatever spirit they had.
He stood up.
‘Where’s everyone gone, Librarian?’
‘Oook oook.’
‘Just like them. I’d have done that. Rush off without thinking. May the gods bless them and help them, if
they can find the time from their eternal family squabbles.’
And then he thought: well, what now? I’ve thought, and what am I going to do? Rush off, of course. But slowly.
The centre of the heap of trolleys was no longer visible. Something was going on. A pale blue glow hung over the huge pyramid of twisted metal, and there were occasional flashes of lightning deep within the pile. Trolleys slammed into it like asteroids accreting around the core of a new planet, but a few arrivals did something else. They headed for tunnels that had opened within the structure, and disappeared into the glittering core.
Then there was a movement at the tip of the mountain and something thrust its way up through the broken metal. Et, was a glistening spike, supporting a globe about two metres across. It did nothing very much for a minute or two and then, as the breeze dried it out, it split and crumbled.
White objects cascaded out, were caught by the wind, and fountained over Ankh-Morpork and the watching crowds.
One of them zigzagged gently down across the rooftops and landed at the feet of Windle Poons as he lurched outside the Library.
It was still damp, and there was writing on it. At least, an attempt at writing. It looked like the strange organic inscription of the snowflake balls – words created by something that was not at all at home with words:
So\le S~l~ I I solre !~~
d b,
S~Q~—%S to/70rro~*-,
Windle reached the University gateway. People were streaming past.
Windle knew his fellow citizens. They’d go to look at anything. They were suckers for anything written down with more than one exclamation mark after it.
He felt someone looking at him, and turned. A trolley was watching from an alleyway; it backed up and whizzed away.
‘What’s happening, Mr Poons?’ said Ludmilla.
There was something unreal about the expression of the passers-by. They wore an expression of unbudgeable anticipation.
You didn’t have to be a wizard to know that something was wrong. And Windle’s senses were whining like a dynamo.
Lupine leapt at a drifting sheet of paper and brought it to him.
\M,..i9 recloctios ir)~l
J ~ooo,
Windle shook his head sadly. Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind.
And then he heard the music.
Lupine sat back on his haunches and howled.
In the cellar under Mrs Cake’s house, Schleppel the bogeyman paused halfway through his third rat and listened.
Then he finished his meal and reached for his door.
Count Arthur Winkings Notfaroutoe was working on the crypt.
Personally, he could have lived, or relived, or un-lived, or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing, without a crypt. But you had to have a crypt. Doreen
had been very definite about the crypt. It gave the place ton, she said. You had to have a crypt anal a vault, otherwise the rest of vampire society would look down their teeth at you.
They never told you about that sort of thing when you started vampiring. They never told you to build your own crypt out of some cheap two-by-four from Challry the Troll’s Wholesale Building Supplies. It wasn’t something that happened to most vampires, Arthur reflected. Not your proper vampires. Your actual Count Jugular, for example. No, a toff like him’d have someone for it. When the villagers came to burn the place down, you wouldn’t catch the Count his own self whipping down to the gate to drop the draw-bridge. Oh, no. He’d just say, ‘Igor’ – as it might be – ‘Igor, just svort it out, chop chop’.