Reaper Man - Terry Pratchett [75]
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 outflank ’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 inquired.
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. Okay, 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, criss-crossing 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.
“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!”
Bill Door nodded, and ran through the squelching darkness toward the farm buildings. Lightning was striking so many times around the