Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett [73]
Real stars shouldn’t do that, Esk decided. Which meant she wasn’t looking at real stars. Which meant she wasn’t exactly in a real place. But a chittering close at hand reminded her that she could almost certainly really die if she once lost track of those noises. She turned and pursued the sounds through the stellar snowstorm.
And the stars jumped, and settled, jumped, and settled…
As she swooped upward Esk tried to concentrate on everyday things, because if she let her mind dwell on precisely what it was she was following then she knew she would turn back, and she wasn’t sure she knew the way. She tried to remember the eighteen herbs that cured earache, which kept her occupied for a while because she could never recall the last four.
A star swooped past, and then was violently jerked away; it was about twenty feet across.
When she ran out of herbs she started on the diseases of goats, which took quite a long time because goats can catch a lot of things that cows can catch plus a lot of things plus that sheep plus catch plus a complete range of horrible ailments of their very own. When she had finished listing wooden udder, ear wilt and the octarine garget she tried to recall the complex code of dots and lines that they used to cut in the trees around Bad Ass, so that lost villagers could find their way home on snowy nights.
She was only as far as dot dot dot dash dot dash (Hub-by-Turnwise, one mile from the village) when the universe around her vanished with a faint pop. She fell forward, hit something hard and gritty and rolled to a halt.
The grittiness was sand. Fine, dry, cold sand. You could tell that even if you dug down several feet it would be just as cold and just as dry.
Esk lay with her face in it for a moment, summoning the courage to look up. She could just see, a few feet away from her, the hem of someone’s dress. Something’s dress, she corrected herself. Unless it was a wing. It could be a wing, a particularly tatty and leathery one.
Her eyes followed it up until she found a face, higher than a house, outlined against the starry sky. Its owner was obviously trying to look nightmarish, but had tried too hard. The basic appearance was that of a chicken that had been dead for about two months, but the unpleasant effect was rather spoiled by warthog tusks, moth antennae, wolf ears and a unicorn spike. The whole thing had a self-assembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn’t quite get to grips with the idea.
It was staring, but not at her. Something behind her occupied all its interest. Esk turned her head very slowly.
Simon was sitting cross-legged in the center of a circle of Things. There were hundreds of them, as still and silent as statues, watching him with reptilian patience.
There was something small and angular held in his cupped hands. It gave off a fuzzy blue light that made his face look strange.
Other shapes lay on the ground beside him, each in its little soft glow. They were the regular sort of shapes that Granny dismissed airily as jommetry—cubes, many-sided diamonds, cones, even a globe. Each one was transparent and inside was…
Esk edged closer. No one was taking any notice of her.
Inside a crystal sphere that had been tossed aside on to the sand floated a blue-green ball, crisscrossed with tiny white cloud patterns and what could almost have been continents if anyone was silly enough to try to live on a ball. It might have been a sort of model, except something about its glow told Esk that it was quite real and probably very big and not—in every sense—totally inside the sphere.
She put it down very gently and sidled over to a ten-sided block in which floated a much more acceptable world. It was properly disc-shaped, but instead of the Rimfall there was a wall of ice and instead of the Hub there was a gigantic tree, so big that its roots merged into mountain ranges.
A prism beside it held another slowly