Equal Rites

dug down several feet it would be just as cold and just as dry.
    Esk lay with her face in it for a moment, summoning the courage to look up. She could just see, a few feet away from her, the hem of someone’s dress. Something’s dress, she corrected herself. Unless it was a wing. It could be a wing, a particularly tatty and leathery one.
    Her eyes followed it up until she found a face, higher than a house, outlined against the starry sky. Its owner was obviously trying to look nightmarish, but had tried too hard. The basic appearance was that of a chicken that had been dead for about two months, but the unpleasant effect was rather spoiled by warthog tusks, moth antennae, wolf ears and a unicorn spike. The whole thing had a self-assembled look, as if the owner had heard about anatomy but couldn’t quite get to grips with the idea.
    It was staring, but not at her. Something behind her occupied all its interest. Esk turned her head very slowly.
    Simon was sitting cross-legged in the center of a circle of Things. There were hundreds of them, as still and silent as statues, watching him with reptilian patience.
    There was something small and angular held in his cupped hands. It gave off a fuzzy blue light that made his face look strange.
    Other shapes lay on the ground beside him, each in its little soft glow. They were the regular sort of shapes that Granny dismissed airily as jommetry—cubes, many-sided diamonds, cones, even a globe. Each one was transparent and inside was…
    Esk edged closer. No one was taking any notice of her.
    Inside a crystal sphere that had been tossed aside on to the sand floated a blue-green ball, crisscrossed with tiny white cloud patterns and what could almost have been continents if anyone was silly enough to try to live on a ball. It might have been a sort of model, except something about its glow told Esk that it was quite real and probably very big and not—in every sense—totally inside the sphere.
    She put it down very gently and sidled over to a ten-sided block in which floated a much more acceptable world. It was properly disc-shaped, but instead of the Rimfall there was a wall of ice and instead of the Hub there was a gigantic tree, so big that its roots merged into mountain ranges.
    A prism beside it held another slowly turning disc, surrounded by little stars. But there were no ice walls around this one, just a red-gold thread that turned out on closer inspection to be a snake—a snake big enough to encircle a world. For reasons best known to itself it was biting its own tail.
    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