Moving Pictures - Terry Pratchett [28]
“Oh gods. For this I’m missing lunch?”
“You could always eat it off my forehead,” said Victor, standing up.
He had the satisfaction of feeling her thoughtful gaze on the back of his neck as he retrieved his sword and gave it a few experimental swishes, with rather more force than was necessary.
“You’re the boy in the street, aren’t you?” she said.
“That’s right. You’re the girl who was going to be shot,” said Victor. “I see they missed.”
She looked at him curiously. “How did you get a job so quickly? Most people have to wait weeks for a chance.”
“Chances are where you find them, I’ve always said,” said Victor.
“But how—”
Victor had already strolled away with gleeful nonchalance. She trailed after him, her face locked in a petulant pout.
“Ah,” said Silverfish sarcastically, looking up. “My word. Everyone where they should be. Very well. We’ll go from the bit where he finds her tied to the stake. What you do,” he said to Victor, “is untie her, then drag her off and fight the Balgrog, and you,” he pointed to the girl, “you, you, you just follow him and look as, as rescued as you possibly can, OK?”
“I’m good at that,” she said, resignedly.
“No, no, no,” said Dibbler, putting his head in his hands.
“Not that again!”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” said Silverfish. “Fights and rescues?”
“There’s got to be more to it than that!” said Dibbler.
“Like what?” Silverfish demanded.
“Oh, I don’t know. Razzmatazz. Oomph. The old zonkaroonie.”
“Funny noises? We haven’t got sound.”
“Everyone makes clicks about people running around and fighting and falling over,” said Dibbler. “There should be something more. I’ve been looking at the things you make here, and they all look the same to me.”
“Well, all sausages look the same to me,” snapped Silverfish.
“They’re meant to! That’s what people expect!”
“And I’m giving them what they expect, too,” said Silverfish. “People like to see more of what they expect. Fights and chases, that sort of thing—”
“’Scuse me, Mister Silverfish,” said the handleman, above the angry chattering of the demons.
“Yes?” snapped Dibbler.
“’Scuse me, Mister Dibbler, but I got to feed ’em ina quarter of a hour.”
Dibbler groaned.
In retrospect, Victor was always a little unclear about those next few minutes. That’s the way it goes. The moments that change your life are the ones that happen suddenly, like the one where you die.
There had been another stylized battle, he knew that much, with Morry and what would have been a fearsome whip if the troll hadn’t kept tangling it around his own legs. And, when the dreadful Balgrog had been beaten and had slid out of shot mugging terribly and trying to hold its wings on with one hand, he’d turned and cut the ropes holding the girl to the stake and should have dragged her sharply to the right when—
—the whispering started.
There were no words but there was something that was the heart of words, that went straight through his ears and down his spinal column without bothering to make a stopover in his brain.
He stared into the girl’s eyes and wondered if she was hearing it too.
A long way off, there were words. There was Silverfish saying, “Come on, get on with it, what are you looking at her like that for?” and the handleman saying, “They gets really fractious if they misses a meal,” and Dibbler saying, in a voice hissing like a thrown knife, “Don’t stop turning the handle.”
The edges of his vision went cloudy, and there were shapes in the cloud that changed and faded before he had a chance to examine them. Helpless as a fly in an amber flow, as much in control of his destiny as a soap bubble in a hurricane, he leaned down and kissed her.
There were more words beyond the ringing in his ears.
“Why’s he doing that? Did I tell him to do that? No one told him to do that!”
“—and then I have to muck ’em out afterward, and let me tell you, it’s no—”
“Turn that handle! Turn that handle!” screamed Dibbler.
“Now why’s he looking like that?”
“Cor!”