Moving pictures

What the Bursar failed to consider was that no more bangsdoesn't mean they've stopped doing it, whatever it is. It just means they're doing it right.

It was midnight. The surf boomed on the beach, and made a phosphorescent glow in the night. Around the ancient hill, though, the sound seemed as dead as if it was arriving through several layers of velvet.

The hole in the sand was quite big now.

If you could put your ear to it, you might think you could hear applause.

It was still midnight. A full moon glided above the smoke and fumes of Ankh-Morpork, thankful that several thousand miles of sky lay between it and them.

The Alchemists' Guildhall was new. It was always new. It had been explosively demolished and rebuilt four times in the last two years, on the last occasion without a lecture and demonstration room in the hope that this might be a helpful move.

On this night a number of muffled figures entered the building in a surreptitious fashion. After a few minutes the lights in a window on the top floor dimmed and went out.

Well, nearly out.

Something was happening up there. A strange flickering filled the window, very briefly. It was followed by a ragged cheering.

And there was a noise. Not a bang this time, but a strange mechanical purring, like a happy cat at the bottom of a tin drum.

It went clickaclickaclickaclicka ... click.

It went on for several minutes, to a background of cheers. And then a voice said:

'That's all, folks.'

'That's all what?' said the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork, next morning.

The man in front of him shivered with fear.

'Don't know, lordship,' he said. 'They wouldn't let me in. They made me wait outside the door, lordship.'

He twisted his forgers together nervously. The Patrician's stare had him pi

Only the Patrician knew how many spies he had in the city. This particular one was a servant in the Alchemists' Guild. He had once had the misfortune to come up before the Patrician accused of malicious lingering, and had then chosen of his own free will to become a spy.[3]

'That's all, lordship,' he whined. 'There was just this clicking noise and this sort of flickery glow under the door. And, er, they said the daylight here was wrong.'

'Wrong? How?'

'Er. Du

The Patrician yawned. There was something infinitely boring about the antics of alchemists.

'Indeed,' he said.

'But they'd had their supper only fifteen minutes before,' the servant blurted out.

'Perhaps whatever they were doing makes people hungry,' said the Patrician.

'Yes, and the kitchen was all shut up for the night and I had to go and buy a tray of hot sausages in buns from Throat Dibbler.'

'Indeed.' The Patrician looked down at the paperwork on his desk. 'Thank you. You may go.'

'You know what, lordship? They liked them. They actually liked them!'

That the Alchemists had a Guild at all was remarkable. Wizards were just as unco-operative, but they also were by nature hierarchical and competitive. They needed organization. What was the good of being a wizard of the Seventh Level if you didn't have six other levels to look down on and the Eighth Level to aspire to? You needed other wizards to hate and despise.

Whereas every alchemist was an alchemist alone, working in darkened rooms or hidden cellars and endlessly searching for the big casino - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of Life. They tended to be thin, pink-eyed men, with beards that weren't really beards but more like groups of individual hairs clustering together for mutual protection, and many of them had that vague, unworldly expression that you get from spending too much time in the presence of boiling mercury.

It wasn't that alchemists hated other alchemists. They often didn't notice them, or thought they were walruses.

And so their tiny, despised Guild had never aspired to the powerful status of the Guilds of, say, the Thieves or the Beggars or the Assassins, but devoted itself instead to the aid of widows and families of those alchemists who had taken an overly relaxed attitude to potassium cyanide, for example, or had distilled some interesting fungi, drunk the result, and then stepped off the roof to play with the fairies. There weren't actually very many widows and orphans, of course, because alchemists found it difficult to relate to other people long enough, and generally if they ever managed to marry it was only to have someone to hold their crucibles.

By and large, the only skill the alchemists of Ankh-Morpork had discovered so far was the ability to turn gold into less gold.

Until now ...

Now they were full of the nervous excitement of those who have found an unexpected fortune in their bank account and don't know whether to draw people's attention to it or simply take the lot and run.

'The wizards aren't going to like it,' said one of them, a thin, hesitant man called Lully. 'They're going to call it magic. You know they get really pissed if they think you're doing magic and you're not a wizard.'

'There isn't any magic involved,' said Thomas Silverfish, the president of the Guild.

'There's the imps.'

'That's not magic. That's just ordinary occult.'

'Well, there's the salamanders.'

'Perfectly normal natural history. Nothing wrong with that.'

'Well, all right. But they'll call it magic. You know what they're like.'

The alchemists nodded gloomily.

'They're reactionaries,' said Sendivoge, the Guild secretary. 'Bloated thaumocrats. And the other Guilds, too. What do they know about the march of progress? What do they care? They could have been doing something like this for years, but did they? Not them! Just think how we can make people's lives so much ... well, better. The possibilities are immense.'

'Educational,' said Silverfish.

'Historical,' said Lully.

'And of course there's entertainment,' said Peavie, the Guild treasurer. He was a small, nervous man. Most alchemists were nervous, in any case; it came from not knowing what the crucible of bubbling stuff they were experimenting with was going to do next.

'Well, yes. Obviously some entertainment,' said Silverfish.

'Some of the great historical dramas,' said Peavie. 'Just picture the scene! You get some actors together, they act it just once, and people all over the Disc will be able to see it as many times as they like! A great saving in wages, by the way,' he added.

'But tastefully done,' said Silverfish. 'We have a great responsibility to see that nothing is done which is in any way ... ' his voice trailed off, ' ... you know ... coarse.'

'They'll stop us,' said Lully darkly. 'I know those wizards.'

3

The alternative was choosing of his own free will to be thrown into the scorpion pit.