Moving Pictures

was the Dibblers.
    “Why’s it frightened of the flame?” said Soll, and the Thing backed away from the advancing wizards. “It’s just illusion. It must be able to feel there’s no heat.”
    Ginger shook her head. She looked like someone surfing on a curling wave of hysteria, perhaps because it is not every day you see giant images of yourself trampling down a city.
    “It’s used Holy Wood magic,” she said. “So it can’t disobey Holy Wood rules. It can’t feel, it can’t hear. It can only see. What it sees is what is real. And what film fears is fire.”
    Now the giant Ginger was pressed against the tower.
    “Well, it’s trapped,” said Dibbler. “They’ve got it now.”
    The Thing blinked at the advancing flames.
    It turned. It reached up with its free hand. It began to climb the tower.

    Victor slid off his horse and stopped concentrating. It vanished.
    Despite his panic, he found room for a tiny gloat. If only wizards had gone to the clicks, they’d have known exactly how to do it.
    It was the critical fusion frequency. Even reality had one. If you could only make something exist for a tiny part of a second, that didn’t mean you’d failed. It meant you had to keep on doing it.
    He scurried crabwise along the base of the tower, staring up at the climbing Thing, and tripped over something metallic. It turned out to be the Librarian’s dropped pike. A little further off, the end of the rope trailed in a puddle.
    He stared at them for a moment, then used the pike to chop a few feet off the rope to make a crude shoulder strap for the weapon.
    He grabbed the rope and gave it an experimental tug, and then…
    There was an unpleasant lack of resistance to the pull. He threw himself backward just before hundreds of feet of sodden rope smacked damply onto the paving.
    He looked around desperately for another route to the top.

    The Dibblers watched open mouthed as the Thing climbed. It wasn’t moving very fast, and occasionally had to wedge the gibbering Librarian into a handy buttress while it found the next handhold, but it was moving up.
    “Oh, yes. Yes. Yes,” breathed Soll. “What a picture! Pure kinema!”
    “A giant woman carrying a screaming ape up a tall building,” sighed Dibbler. “And we’re not even having to pay wages!”
    “Yeah,” said Soll.
    “Yeah…” said Dibbler. There was a tiny note of uncertainty in his voice.
    Soll looked wistful.
    “Yeah,” he repeated. “Er.”
    “I know what you mean,” said Dibbler slowly.
    “It’s…I mean, it’s really great, but…well, I can’t help feeling…”
    “Yeah. There’s something wrong,” said Dibbler flatly.
    “Not wrong,” said Soll desperately. “Not exactly wrong. Not wrong as such. Just missing…” He stopped, at a loss for words.
    He sighed. And Dibbler sighed.
    Overhead, the thunder rolled.
    And out of the sky came a broomstick with two screaming wizards on it.

    Victor pushed open the door at the base of the Tower of Art.
    It was dark inside, and he could hear water dripping down from the distant roof.
    The tower was said to be the oldest building in the world. It certainly felt like it. It wasn’t used for anything now, and the internal floors had long ago rotted away, so that all that was left inside was the staircase.
    It was a spiral, made of huge slabs set into the wall itself. Some of them were missing. It’d be a dangerous climb, even in daylight.
    In the dark…not a chance.
    The door slammed open behind him and Ginger strode in, dragging the handleman behind her.
    “Well?” she said. “Hurry up. You’ve got to save that poor monkey.”
    “Ape,” said Victor absently.
    “Whatever.”
    “It’s too dark,” Victor muttered.
    “It’s never too dark in the clicks,” said Ginger flatly.
    “Think about it.”
    She nudged the handleman, who said, very quickly, “She’s right. ’S never dark in the clicks. Stands to reason. You’ve got to have enough light to see the dark by.”
    Victor glanced up at the gloom, and then back at Ginger.
    “Listen!” he said urgently. “If I…if something goes wrong, tell the wizards about the…you know. The pit. The Things will be trying to break through there, too.”
    “I’m not going back there!”
    There was a roll of thunder.
    “Get going!” shouted Ginger, white-faced. “Lights! Picture box! Action! And stuff like that!”
    Victor gritted his teeth and ran for it. There was enough light to give the darkness a shape, and he leapt from