Equal Rites - Terry Pratchett [74]
Esk turned the prism over and over curiously, noticing how the little disc inside stayed resolutely upright.
Simon giggled softly. Esk replaced the snake-disc and peered carefully over his shoulder.
He was holding a small glass pyramid. There were stars in it, and occasionally he would give it a little shake so that the stars swirled up like snow in the wind, and then settled back in their places. Then he would giggle.
And beyond the stars…
It was the Discworld. A Great A’Tuin no bigger than a small saucer toiled along under a world that looked like the work of an obsessive jeweler.
Jiggle, swirl. Jiggle, swirl, giggle. There were already hairline cracks in the glass.
Esk looked at Simon’s blank eyes and then up into the hungry faces of the nearest Things, and then she reached across and pulled the pyramid out of his hands and turned and ran.
The Things didn’t stir as she scurried toward them, bent almost double, with the pyramid clasped tightly to her chest. But suddenly her feet were no longer running over the sand and she was being lifted into the frigid air, and a Thing with a face like a drowned rabbit turned slowly toward her and extended a talon.
You’re not really here, Esk told herself. It’s only a sort of dream, what Granny calls an annaloggy. You can’t really be hurt, it’s all imagination. There’s absolutely no harm that can come to you, it’s all really inside your mind.
I wonder if it knows that?
The talon picked her out of the air and the rabbit face split like a banana skin. There was no mouth, just a dark hole, as if the Thing was itself an opening to an even worse dimension, a place by comparison with which freezing sand and moonless moonlight would be a jolly afternoon at the seaside.
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 coat hangers. 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 toward 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 toward the nearest one. It tried