The alchemists sat back and looked more cheerful.
'Yeah,' said Lully.
'Oh. Right,' said Peavie.
'Here's to moving pictures,' said Sendivoge, holding up a handful of banged grains. 'How'd you hear about this place?'
'Oh, I-' Silverfish stopped. He looked puzzled. 'Don't know,' he said, eventually. 'Can't . . . quite remember. Must have heard about it once and forgot it, and then it just popped into my head. You know how these things happen.'
'Yeah,' said Lully. 'Like with me and the film. It was like I was remembering how to do it. Funny old tricks the mind can play.'
'Yeah.'
'Yeah.'
' 'S'n idea whose time has come, see.'
'Yeah.'
'Yeah.'
'That must be it.'
A slightly worried silence settled over the table. It was the sound of minds trying to put their mental fingers on something that was bothering them.
The air seemed to glitter.
'What's this place called?' said Lully, eventually.
'Don't know what it was called in the old days,' said Silverfish, leaning back and pulling the banged grains towards him. 'These days they call it the Holy Wood.'
'Holy Wood,' said Lully. 'Sounds . . . familiar.' There was another silence while they thought about it.
It was broken by Sendivoge.
'Oh, well,' he said cheerfully, 'Holy Wood, here we come.'
'Yeah,' said Silverfish, shaking his head as if to dislodge a disquieting thought. 'Funny thing, really. I've got. this feeling . . . that we've been going there . . . all this time.'
Several thousand miles under Silverfish, Great A'Tuin the world turtle sculled dreamily on through the starry night.
Reality is a curve.
That's not the problem. The problem is that there isn't as much as there should be. According to some of the more mystical texts in the stacks of the library of Unseen University
- the Discworld's premier college of wizardry and big dinners, whose collection of books is so massive that it distorts Space and Time -
- at least nine-tenths of all the original reality ever created lies outside the multiverse, and since the multiverse by definition includes absolutely everything that is anything, this puts a bit of a strain on things.
Outside the boundaries of the universes lie the raw realities, the couldhave-beens, the might-bes, the neverweres, the wild ideas, all being created and uncreated chaotically like elements in fermenting supernovas.
Just occasionally where the walls of the worlds have worn a bit thin, they can leak in.
And reality leaks out.
The effect is like one of those deep-sea geysers of hot water, around which strange submarine creatures find enough warmth and food to make a brief, tiny oasis of existence in an environment where there shouldn't be any existence at all.
The idea of Holy Wood leaked innocently and joyfully into the Discworld.